Picture and text

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CONTENTS

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BLACK AND WHITE I

EDWIN A. ABBEY 44

CHARLES S. REINHART 6l

ALFRED PARSONS 79

JOHN S. SARGENT 92

HONORE DAUMIER Jl6

AFTER THE PLAY 145

ILLUSTRATIONS

HENRY JAMES Frontispiece

THE OLD HOUSE," THE PRIORY," BROAD
WAY, USED AS A STUDIO BY MILLET
AND ABBEY Faces p. 6

F. D. MILLET " 12

BACK OF THE PRIORY, BROADWAY . . " 2O

GEORGE H. BOUGHTON "28

GEORGE DU MAURIER "34

THE VILLAGE GREEN, BROADWAY . . "40

ALFRED PARSONS . "86

BLACK AND WHITE

F there be nothing new under
the sun there are some things
a good deal less old than oth
ers. The illustration of books,
and even more of magazines,
may be said to have been born in our time,
so far as variety and abundance are the
signs of it ; or born, at any rate, the com
prehensive, ingenious, sympathetic spirit in
which we conceive and practise it.

If the centuries are ever arraigned at some
bar of justice to answer in regard to what
they have given, of good or of bad, to hu
manity, our interesting age (which certainly
is not open to the charge of having stood
with its hands in its pockets) might per
haps do worse than put forth the plea of
having contributed a fresh interest in " black
and white." The claim may now be made

with the more confidence from the very ev
ident circumstance that this interest is far
from exhausted. These pages are an ex
cellent place for such an assumption. In
HARPER they have again and again, as it
were, illustrated the illustration, and they
constitute for the artist a series of invita
tions, provocations and opportunities. They
may be referred to without arrogance in sup
port of the contention that the limits of this
large movement, with all its new and rare
refinement, are not yet in sight.

I

It is on the contrary the constant exten
sion that is visible, with the attendant cir
cumstances of multiplied experiment and
intensified research — circumstances that
lately pressed once more on the attention
of the writer of these remarks on his find
ing himself in the particular spot which
history will perhaps associate most with
the charming revival. A very old English
village, lying among its meadows and

hedges, iff the very heart of the country, in
a hollow of the green hills of Worcester
shire, is responsible directly and indirectly
for some of the most beautiful work in
black and white with which I am at liberty
to concern myself here ; in other words, for
much of the work of Mr. Abbey and Mr. Al
fred Parsons. I do not mean that Broadway
has told these gentlemen all they know (the
name, from which the American reader has
to brush away an incongruous association,
may as well be written first as last); for
Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows ev
erything that can be known about Eng
lish fields and flowers, would have good
reason to insist that the measure of his
large landscape art is a large experience. I
only suggest that if one loves Broadway
and is familiar with it. and if a part of that
predilection is that one has seen Mr. Ab
bey and Mr. Parsons at work there, the
pleasant confusion takes place of itself;
one's affection for the wide, long, grass-
bordered vista of brownish gray cottages,
thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied,
immemorial, grows with the sense of its
having ministered to other minds and trans-

ferred itself to other recipients ; just as the
beauty of many a bit in many a drawing of
the artists I have mentioned is enhanced
by the sense, or at any rate by the desire,
of recognition. Broadway and much of the
land about it are in short the perfection of
the old English rural tradition, and if they
do not underlie all the combinations by
which (in their pictorial accompaniments
to rediscovered ballads, their vignettes to
story or sonnet) these particular talents
touch us almost to tears, we feel at least
that they would have sufficed : they cover
the scale.

In regard, however, to the implications
and explications of this perfection of a vil
lage, primarily and to be just, Broadway is,
more than any one else, Mr. Frank Millet.
Mr. Laurence Hutton discovered but Mr.
Millet appropriated it ; its sweetness was
wasted until he began to distil and bottle
it. He disinterred the treasure, and with
impetuous liberality made us sharers in his
fortune. His own work, moreover, betrays
him, as well as the gratitude of participants,
as I could easily prove if it did not per
versely happen that he has commemorated

most of his impressions in color. That ex
cludes them from the small space here at
my command ; otherwise I could testify to
the identity of old nooks and old objects,
those that constitute both out-of-door and
in-door furniture.

In such places as Broadway, and it is part
of the charm of them to American eyes, the
sky looks down on almost as many "things "
as the ceiling, and " things " are the joy of
the illustrator. Furnished apartments are
useful to the artist, but a furnished country
is still more to his purpose. A ripe mid
land English region is a museum of acces
sories and specimens, and is sure, under any
circumstances, to contain the article want
ed. This is the great recommendation of
Broadway ; everything in it is convertible.
Even the passing visitor finds himself be
coming so; the place has so much charac
ter that it rubs off on him, and if in an old
garden — an old garden with old gates and
old walls and old summer-houses — he lies
down on the old grass (on an immemorial
rug, no doubt), it is ten to one but that he
will be converted. The little oblong sheaves
of blank paper with elastic straps are flut-

tering all over the place. There is portrait
ure in the air and composition in the very
accidents. Everything is a subject or an
effect, a "bit "or a good thing. It is al
ways some kind of day ; if it be not one kind
it is another. The garden walls, the mossy
roofs, the open doorways and brown inte
riors, the old-fashioned flowers, the bushes in
figures, the geese on the green, the patches,
the jumbles, the glimpses, the color, the sur
face, the general complexion of things, have
all a value, a reference and an application.
If they are a matter of appreciation, that is
why the gray - brown houses are perhaps
more brown than gray, and more yellow than
either. They are various things in turn, ac
cording to lights and days and needs. It
is a question of color (all consciousness at
Broadway is that), but the irresponsible
profane are not called upon to settle the
tint.

It is delicious to be at Broadway and to
be one of the irresponsible profane — not to
have to draw. The single street is in the
grand style, sloping slowly upward to the
base of the hills for a mile, but you may en
joy it without a carking care as to how to

THE OLD HOUSE, "THE PRIORY," BROADWAY,
USED AS A STUDIO BY MILLET AND ABBEY

"render" the perspective. Everything is
stone except the general greenness — a
charming smooth local stone, which looks
as if it had been meant for great construc
tions and appears even in dry weather to
have been washed and varnished by the
rain. Half-way up the road, in the widest
place, where the coaches used to turn (there
were many of old, but the traffic of Broad
way was blown to pieces by steam, though
the destroyer has not come nearer than half
a dozen miles), a great gabled mansion,
which was once a manor or a house of
state, and is now a rambling inn, stands
looking at a detached swinging sign which
is almost as big as itself — a very grand sign,
the " arms " of an old family, on the top of
a very tall post. You will find something
very like the place among Mr. Abbey's de
lightful illustrations to " She Stoops to Con
quer." When the September day grows
dim and some of the windows glow, you
may look out, if you like, for Tony Lump-
kin's red coat in the doorway or imagine
Miss Hardcastle's quilted petticoat on the
stair.

II

It is characteristic of Mr. Frank Millet's
checkered career, with opposites so much
mingled in it, that such work as he has done
for HARPER should have had as little in
common as possible with midland English
scenery. He has been less a producer in
black and white than a promoter and, as I
may say, a protector of such production in
others ; but none the less the back volumes
of HARPER testify to the activity of his pen
cil as well as to the variety of his interests.
There was a time when he drew little else
but Cossacks and Orientals, and drew them
as one who had good cause to be vivid. Of
the young generation he was the first to
know the Russian plastically, especially the
Russian soldier, and he had paid heavily for
his acquaintance. During the Russo-Turk-
ish war he was correspondent in the field
(with the victors) of the New York Herald
and the London Daily News — a capacity in

which he made many out-of-the-way, many
precious, observations. He has seen strange
countries — the East and the South and the
West and the North — and practised many
arts. To the London Graphic in 1877 he
sent striking sketches from the East, as well
as capital prose to the journals I have men
tioned. He has always been as capable of
writing a text for his own sketches as of
making sketches for the text of others. He
has made pictures without words and words
without pictures. He has written some very
clever ghost-stories, and drawn and painted
some very immediate realities. He has
lately given himself up to these latter ob
jects, and discovered that they have mys
teries more absorbing than any others. I
find in HARPER, in 1885, "A Wild-goose
Chase " through North Germany and Den
mark, in which both pencil and pen are Mr.
Millet's, and both show the natural and the
trained observer.

He knows the art-schools of the Conti
nent, the studios of Paris, the " dodges "
of Antwerp, the subjects, the models of
Venice, and has had much aesthetic as well
as much personal experience. He has

draped and distributed Greek plays at
Harvard, as well as ridden over Balkans
to post pressing letters, and given publicity
to English villages in which susceptible
Americans may get the strongest sensa
tions with the least trouble to themselves.
If the trouble in each case will have been
largely his, this is but congruous with the
fact that he has not only found time to have
a great deal of history himself, but has suf
fered himself to be converted by others into
an element — beneficent I should call it if
discretion did not forbid me — of their his
tory. Springing from a very old New Eng
land stock, he has found the practice of art
a wonderful antidote, in his own language,
" for belated Puritanism." He is very mod
ern, in the sense of having tried many things
and availed himself of all of the facilities of
his time ; but especially on this ground of
having fought out for himself the battle of
the Puritan habit and the aesthetic experi
ment. His experiment was admirably suc
cessful from the moment that the Puritan
levity was forced to consent to its becom
ing a serious one. In other words, if Mr.
Millet is artistically interesting to-day (and

to the author of these remarks he is highly
so), it is because he is a striking example
of what the typical American quality can
achieve.

He began by having an excellent pencil,
because as a thoroughly practical man he
could not possibly have had a weak one.
But nothing is more remunerative to follow
than the stages by which " faculty " in gen
eral (which is what I mean by the charac
teristic American quality) has become the
particular faculty ; so that if in the artist's
present work one recognizes — recognizes
even fondly — the national handiness, it is
as handiness regenerate and transfigured.
The American adaptiveness has become a
Dutch finish. The only criticism I have to
make is of the preordained paucity of Mr.
Millet's drawings ; for my mission is not to
speak of his work in oils, every year more
important (as was indicated by the brilliant
interior with figures that greeted the spec
tator in so friendly a fashion on the thresh
old of the Royal Academy exhibition of
1888), nor to say that it is illustration too —
illustration of any old-fashioned song or
story that hums in the brain or haunts the

memory — nor even to hint that the admi
rable rendering of the charming old objects
with which it deals (among which I include
the human face and figure in dresses un
folded from the lavender of the past), the
old surfaces and tones, the stuffs and text
ures, the old mahogany and silver and brass
— the old sentiment too, and the old picture-
making vision — are in the direct tradition
of Terburg and De Hoogh and Metzu.

Ill

There is no paucity about Mr. Abbey as
a virtuoso in black and white, and if one
thing more than another sets the seal upon
the quality of his work, it is the rare abun
dance in which it is produced. It is not a
frequent thing to find combinations infinite
as well as exquisite. Mr. Abbey has so
many ideas, and the gates of composition
have been opened so wide to him, that we
cultivate his company with a mixture of
confidence and excitement. The readers
of HARPER have had for years a great deal

F. D. MILLET

of it, and they will easily recognize the feel
ing I allude to — the expectation of famili
arity in variety. The beautiful art and taste,
the admirable execution, strike the hour with
the same note ; but the figure, the scene, is
ever a fresh conception. Never was ripe
skill less mechanical, and never was the
faculty of perpetual evocation less addicted
to prudent economies. Mr. Abbey never
saves for the next picture, yet the next pict
ure will be as expensive as the last. His
whole career has been open to the readers
of HARPER, so that what they may enjoy on
any particular occasion is not only the tal
ent, but a kind of affectionate sense of the
history of the talent, That history is, from
the beginning, in these pages, and it is one
of the most interesting and instructive, just
as the talent is one of the richest and the
most sympathetic in the art-annals of our
generation. I may as well frankly declare
that I have such a taste for Mr. Abbey's
work that I cannot affect a judicial tone
about it. Criticism is appreciation or it is
nothing, and an intelligence of the matter
in hand is recorded more substantially in a
single positive sign of such appreciation than

in a volume of sapient objections for ob
jection's sake — the cheapest of all literary
commodities. Silence is the perfection
of disapproval, and it has the great merit
of leaving the value of speech, when the
moment comes for it, unimpaired.

Accordingly it is important to translate
as adequately as possible the positive side
of Mr. Abbey's activity. None to-day is
more charming, and none helps us more to
take the large, joyous, observant, various
view of the business of art. He has en
larged the idea of illustration, and he plays
with it in a hundred spontaneous, ingen
ious ways. " Truth and poetry " is the motto
legibly stamped upon his pencil-case, for if
he has on the one side a singular sense of
the familiar, salient, importunate facts of
life, on the other they reproduce themselves
in his mind in a delightfully qualifying me
dium. It is this medium that the fond ob
server must especially envy Mr. Abbey, and
that a literary observer will envy him most
of all.

Such a hapless personage, who may have
spent hours in trying to produce something
of the same result by sadly different means,

»s

will measure the difference between the
roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of re
spectable prose and the immediate projec
tion of the figure by the pencil. A charm
ing story-teller indeed he would be who
should write as Mr. Abbey draws. How
ever, what is style for one art is style for
another, so blessed is the fraternity that
binds them together, and the worker in
words may take a lesson from the picture-
maker of " She Stoops to Conquer." It is
true that what the verbal artist would like
to do would be to find out the secret of the
pictorial, to drink at the same fountain.
Mr. Abbey is essentially one of those who
would tell us if he could, and conduct us
to the magic spring ; but here he is in the
nature of the case helpless, for the happy
ambiente,?& the Italians call it, in which his
creations move is exactly the thing, as I
take it, that he can least give an account of.
It is a matter of genius and imagination —
one of those things that a man determines
for himself as little as he determines the
color of his eyes. How, for instance, can
Mr. Abbey explain the manner in which he
directly observes figures, scenes, places, that

exist only in the fairy-land of his fancy ?
For the peculiar sign of his talent is surely
this observation in the remote. It brings
the remote near to us, but such a compli
cated journey as it must first have had to
make ! Remote in time (in differing de
grees), remote in place, remote in feeling,
in habit, and in their ambient air, are the
images that spring from his pencil, and yet
all so vividly, so minutely, so consistently
seen ! Where does he see them, where
does he find them, how does he catch them,
and in what language does he delightfully
converse with them ? In what mystic re
cesses of space does the revelation descend
upon him ?

The questions flow from the beguiled but
puzzled admirer, and their tenor sufficiently
expresses the claim I make for the admirable
artist when I say that his truth is interfused
with poetry. He spurns the literal and yet
superabounds in the characteristic, and if he
makes the strange familiar he makes the fa
miliar just strange enough to be distinguish
ed. Everything is so human, so humorous
and so caught in the act, so buttoned and
petticoated and gartered, that it might be

<7

round the corner ; and so it is — but the cor
ner is the corner of another world. In that
other world Mr. Abbey went forth to dwell
in extreme youth, as I need scarcely be at
pains to remind those who have followed
him in HARPER. It is not important here
to give a catalogue of his contributions to
that journal : turn to the back volumes and
you will meet him at every step. Every one
remembers his young, tentative, prelusive
illustrations to Herrick, in which there are
the prettiest glimpses, guesses and fore
knowledge of the effects he was to make
completely his own. The Herrick was
done mainly, if I mistaTce not, before he
had been to England, and it remains, in the
light of this fact, a singularly touching as
well as a singularly promising performance.
The eye of sense in such a case had to be
to a rare extent the mind's eye, and this
convertibility of the two organs has per
sisted.

From the first and always that otherworld
and that qualifying medium in which I have
said that the human spectacle goes on for
Mr. Abbey have been a county of old Eng
land which is not to be found in any geog-

raphy, though it borders, as I have hinted,
on the Worcestershire Broadway. Few ar
tistic phenomena are more curious than the
congenital acquaintance of this perverse
young Philadelphian with that mysterious
locality. It is there that he finds them all
— the nooks, the corners, the people, the
clothes, the arbors and gardens and tea
houses, the queer courts of old inns, the
sun-warmed angles of old parapets. I ought
to have mentioned for completeness, in ad
dition to his pictures to Goldsmith and to
the scraps of homely British song (this lat
ter class has contained some of his most
exquisite work), his delicate drawings for
Mr. William Black's Judith Shakespeare.
And in relation to that distinguished name
— I don't mean Mr. Black's — it is a comfort,
if I may be allowed the expression, to know
that (as, to the best of my belief, I violate
no confidence in saying) he is even now
engaged in the great work of illustrating
the comedies. He is busy with " The Mer
chant of Venice ;" he is up to his neck in
studies, in rehearsals. Here again, while
in prevision I admire the result, what I can
least refrain from expressing is a sort of

"9

envy of the process, knowing what it is
with Mr. Abbey and what explorations of
the delightful it entails — arduous, indefati
gable, till the end seems almost smothered
in the means (such material complications
they engender), but making one's daily task
a thing of beauty and honor and beneficence.

IV

Even if Mr. Alfred Parsons were not a
masterly contributor to the pages of HAR
PER, it would still be almost inevitable to
speak of him after speaking of Mr. Abbey,
for the definite reason (I hope that in giving
it I may not appear to invade too grossly
the domain of private life) that these gentle
men are united in domestic circumstance as
well as associated in the nature of their
work. In London, in the relatively lucid
air of Campden Hill, they dwell together,
and their beautiful studios are side by side.
However, there is a reason for commemo
rating Mr. Parsons' work which has nothing
to do with the accidental — the simple fact

that that work forms the richest illustration
of the English landscape that is offered us
to-day. HARPER has for a long time past
been full of Mr. Alfred Parsons, who has
made the dense, fine detail of his native land
familiar in far countries, amid scenery of a
very different type. This is what the mod
ern illustration can do when the ripeness of
the modern sense is brought to it and the
wood -cutter plays with difficulties as the
brilliant Americans do to-day, following his
original at a breakneck pace. An illusion
is produced which, in its very completeness,
makes one cast an uneasy eye over the
dwindling fields that are still left to con
quer. Such art as Alfred Parsons' — such
an accomplished translation of local aspects,
translated in its turn by cunning hands and
diffused by a wonderful system of periodic
ity through vast and remote communities,
has, I confess, in a peculiar degree, the ef
fect that so many things have in this age of
multiplication — that of suppressing intervals
and differences and making the globe seem
alarmingly small. Vivid and repeated evo
cations of English rural things — the mead
ows and lanes, the sedgy streams, the old

BACK OF THE PRIORY, BROADWAY

orchards and timbered houses, the stout,
individual, insular trees, the flowers under
the hedge and in it and over it, the sweet
rich country seen from the slope, the bend
of the unformidable river, the actual ro
mance of the castle against the sky, the
place on the hill-side where the gray church
begins to peep (a peaceful little grassy path
leads up to it over a stile) — all this brings
about a terrible displacement of the very
objects that make pilgrimage a passion,
and hurries forward that ambiguous ad
vantage which I don't envy our grandchil
dren, that of knowing all about everything
in advance, having trotted round the globe
annually in the magazines and lost the
bloom of personal experience. It is a part
of the general abolition of mystery with
which we are all so complacently busy to
day. One would like to retire to another
planet with a box of Mr. Parsons' drawings,
and be homesick there for the pleasant
places they commemorate.

There are many things to be said about
his talent, some of which are not the easiest
in the world to express. I shall not, how
ever, make them more difficult by attempt-

ing to catalogue his contributions in these
pages. A turning of the leaves of HARPER
brings one constantly face to face with him,
and a systematic search speedily makes one
intimate. The reader will remember the
beautiful Illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's
novel of Springhaven, which were inter
spersed with striking figure-pieces from the
pencil of that very peculiar pictorial humor
ist Mr. Frederick Barnard, who, allowing
for the fact that he always seems a little too
much to be drawing for Dickens and that
the footlights are the illumination of his
scenic world, has so remarkable a sense of
English types and attitudes, costumes and
accessories, in what may be called thegreat-
coat-and-gaiters period — the period when
people were stiff with riding and wicked
conspiracies went forward in sanded pro
vincial inn -parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons,
who is still conveniently young, waked to
his first vision of pleasant material in the
comprehensive county of Somerset — a capi
tal centre of impression for a painter of the
bucolic. He has been to America; he has
even reproduced with remarkable discrim
ination and truth some of the way -side

objects of that country, not making them
look in the least like their English equiva
lents, if equivalents they may be said to
have. Was it there that Mr. Parsons learn
ed so well how Americans would like Eng
land to appear? I ask this idle question
simply because the England of his pencil,
and not less of his brush (of his eminent
brush there would be much to say), is ex
actly the England that the American imag
ination, restricted to itself, constructs from
the poets, the novelists, from all the de
lightful testimony it inherits. It was scarce
ly to have been supposed possible that the
native point of view would embrace and
observe so many of the things that the
more or less famished outsider is, in vulgar
parlance, "after." In other words (though
I appear to utter a foolish paradox), the
danger might have been that Mr. Parsons
knew his subject too well to feel it— to feel
It, I mean, a rAmtricaine. He is as tender
of it as if he were vague about it, and as
certain of it as if he were blast.

But after having wished that his country
should be just so, we proceed to discover
that it is in fact not a bit different. Between

these phases of our consciousness he is an
unfailing messenger. The reader will re
member how often he has accompanied with
pictures the text of some amiable paper de
scribing a pastoral region — Warwickshire
or Surrey, Devonshire or the Thames. He
will remember his exquisite designs for cer
tain of Wordsworth's sonnets. A sonnet of
Wordsworth is a difficult thing to illustrate,
but Mr. Parsons' ripe taste has shown him
the way. Then there are lovely morsels
from his hand associated with the drawings
of his friend Mr. Abbey — head-pieces, tail
pieces, vignettes, charming combinations of
flower and foliage, decorative clusters of all
sorts of pleasant rural emblems. If he has
an inexhaustible feeling for the country in
general, his love of the myriad English flow
ers is perhaps the fondest part of/it. He
draws them with a rare perfection, and
always — little definite, delicate, tremulous
things as they are — with a certain noble
ness. This latter quality, indeed, I am prone
to find in all his work, and I should insist
on it still more if I might refer to his im
portant paintings. So composite are the
parts of which any distinguished talent is

made up that we have to feel our way as
we enumerate them ; and yet that very am
biguity is a challenge to analysis and to
characterization. This " nobleness " on Mr.
Parsons' part is the element of style — some
thing large and manly, expressive of the
total character of his facts. His landscape
is the landscape of the male vision , and yet
his touch is full of sentiment, of curiosity
and endearment. These things, and others
besides, make him the most interesting, the
most living, of the new workers in his line.
And what shall I say of the other things be
sides ? How can I take precautions enough
to say that among the new workers, deeply
English as he is, there is comparatively
something French in his manner? Many
people will like him because they see in him
— or they think they do — a certain happy
mean. Will they not fancy they catch him
taking the middle way between the unsoci
able French ttude and the old-fashioned
English "picture"? If one of these ex
tremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is
an oasis still more vain. I have a recollec
tion of productions of Mr. Alfred Parsons'
which might have come from a Frenchman

who was in love with English river-sides.
I call to mind no studies — if he has made
any — of French scenery, but if I did they
would doubtless appear English enough. It
is the fashion among sundry to maintain
that the English landscape is of no use for
la peinture strieuse, that it is wanting in
technical accent and is in general too story
telling, too self-conscious and dramatic, also
too lumpish and stodgy, of a green — cTun
•vert bete — which, when reproduced, looks like
that of the chromo. Certain it is that there
are many hands which are not to be trusted
with it, and taste and integrity have been
known to go down before it. But Alfred
Parsons may be pointed to as one who has
made the luxuriant and lovable things of
his own country almost as " serious " as those
familiar objects— the pasture and the poplar
— which, even when infinitely repeated by
the great school across the Channel, strike
us as but meagre morsels of France.

In speaking of Mr. George H. Boughton,
A.R.A., I encounter the same difficulty as
with Mr. Millet: I find the window closed
through which alone almost it is just to take
a view of his talent. Mr. Boughton is a
painter about whom there is little that is
new to tell to-day, so conspicuous and in
contestable is his achievement, the fruit of
a career of which the beginning was not
yesterday. He is a draughtsman and an il
lustrator only on occasion and by accident.
These accidents have mostly occurred, how
ever. In the pages of HARPER, and the
happiest of them will still be fresh in the
memory of its readers. In the Sketching
Rambles in Holland Mr. Abbey was a par
ticipant (as witness, among many things,
the admirable drawing of the old Frisian
woman bent over her Bible in church, with
the heads of the burghers just visible above
the rough archaic pew-tops — a drawing op-

posite to page 112 in the handsome volume
into which these contributions were eventu
ally gathered together) ; but most of the
sketches were Mr. Boughton's, and the
charming, amusing text is altogether his,
save in the sense that it commemorates his
companion's impressions as well as his own
— the delightful, irresponsible, visual, sen
sual, pictorial, capricious impressions of a
painter in a strange land, the person surely
whom at particular moments one would give
most to be. If there be anything happier
than the impressions of a painter, it is the
impressions of two, and the combination is
set forth with uncommon spirit and humor
in this frank record of the innocent lust of
the eyes. Mr. Boughton scruples little, in
general, to write as well as to draw, when
the fancy takes him ; to write in the man
ner of painters, with the bold, irreverent,
unconventional, successful brush. If I were
not afraid of the patronizing tone I would
say that there is little doubt that if as a
painter he had not had to try to write in
character, he would certainly have made
a characteristic writer. He has the most
enviable " finds," not dreamed of in timid

GEORGE H. BOUGHTON

literature, yet making capital descriptive
prose. Other specimens of them may be
encountered in two or three Christmas tales,
signed with the name whose usual place is
the corner of a valuable canvas.

If Mr. Boughton is in this manner not a
simple talent, further complications and re
versions may be observed in him, as, for in
stance, that having reverted from America,
where he spent his early years, back to Eng
land, the land of his origin, he has now in
a sense oscillated again from the latter to
the former country. He came to London
one day years ago (from Paris, where he
had been eating nutritively of the tree of
artistic knowledge), in order to re-embark
on the morrow for the United States ; but
that morrow never came — it has never come
yet. Certainly now it never can come, for
the country that Mr. Boughton left behind
him in his youth is no longer there ; the
" old New York " is no longer a port to sail
to, unless for phantom ships. In imagina
tion, however, the author of " The Return
of the Mayflower " has several times taken
his way back ; he has painted with con
spicuous charm and success various episodes

3°

of the early Puritan story. He was able on
occasion to remember vividly enough the
low New England coast and the thin New
England air. He has been perceptibly an
inventor, calling into being certain types of
face and dress, certain tones and associa
tions of color (all in the line of what I should
call subdued harmonies if I were not afraid
of appearing to talk a jargon), which peo
ple are hungry for when they acquire "a
Boughton," and which they can obtain on
no other terms. This pictorial element in
which he moves is made up of divers deli
cate things, and there would be a rough
ness in attempting to unravel the tapestry.
There is old English, and old American, and
old Dutch in it, and a friendly, unexpected
new Dutch too — an ingredient of New Am
sterdam — a strain of Knickerbocker and of
Washington Irving. There is an admirable
infusion of landscape in it, from which some
people regret that Mr. Boughton should
ever have allowed himself to be distracted
by his importunate love of sad-faced, pretty
women in close-fitting coifs and old silver-
clasped cloaks. And indeed, though his
figures are very " tender," his landscape is

3'

to my sense tenderer still. Moreover, Mr.
Boughton bristles, not aggressively, but in
the degree of a certain conciliatory perti
nacity, with contradictious properties. He
lives in one of the prettiest and most hos
pitable houses in London, but the note of
his work is the melancholy of rural things,
of lonely people and of quaint, far-off legend
and refrain. There is a delightful ambiguity
of period and even of clime in him, and he
rejoices in that inability to depict the mod
ern which is the most convincing sign of
the contemporary. He has a genius for
landscape, yet he abounds in knowledge of
every sort of ancient fashion of garment;
the buckles and button-holes, the very shoe-
ties, of the past are dear to him. It is al
most always autumn or winter in his pict
ures. His horizons are cold, his trees are
bare (he does the bare tree beautifully), and
his draperies lined with fur ; but when he
exhibits himself directly, as in the fantastic
" Rambles " before mentioned, contagious
high spirits are the clearest of his showing.
Here he appears as an irrepressible felicitous
sketcher, and I know no pleasanter record
of the joys of sketching, or even of those of

simply looking. Theophile Gautier himself
was not more inveterately addicted to this
latter wanton exercise. There ought to be
a pocket edition of Mr. Boughton's book,
which would serve for travellers in other
countries too, give them the point of view
and put them in the mood. Such a blessing,
and such a distinction too, is it to have an
eye. Mr. Boughton's, in his good-humored
Dutch wanderings, holds from morning till
night a sociable, graceful revel. From the
moment it opens till the moment it closes,
its day is a round of adventures. His jolly
pictorial narrative, reflecting every glint of
October sunshine and patch of russet shade,
tends to confirm us afresh in the faith that
the painter's life is the best life, the life that
misses fewest impressions.

VI

Mr. Du Maurier has a brilliant history,
but it must be candidly recognized that it
is written or drawn mainly in an English
periodical. It is only during the last two
or three years that the most ironical of the
artists of Punch has exerted himself for the
entertainment of the readers of HARPER ;
but I seem to come too late with any com
mentary on the nature of his satire or the
charm of his execution. When he began
to appear in HARPER he was already an old
friend, and for myself I confess I have to
go through rather a complicated mental
operation to put into words what I think of
him. What does a man think of the lan
guage he has learned to speak ? He judges
it only while he is learning. Mr. Du Mau-
rier's work, in regard to the life it embodies,
is not so much a thing we see as one of the
conditions of seeing. He has interpreted
for us for so many years the social life of

3

England that the interpretation has become
the text itself. We have accepted his types,
his categories, his conclusions, his sympa
thies and his ironies. It is not given to all
the world to thread the mazes of London
society, and for the great body of the dis
inherited, the vast majority of the Anglo-
Saxon public, Mr. Du Maurier's representa
tion is the thing represented. Is the effect
of it to nip in the bud any remote yearning
for personal participation ? I feel tempted
to say yes, when I think of the follies, the
flatnesses, the affectations and stupidities
that his teeming pencil has made vivid.
But that vision immediately merges itself
in another — a panorama of tall, pleasant,
beautiful people, placed in becoming atti
tudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious
rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is
the more definite, the impression satiric or
the imoression plastic.

This I take to be a sign that Mr. Du
Maurier knows how to be general and has
a conception of completeness. The world
amuses him, such queer things go on in it ;
but the part that amuses him most is cer
tain lines of our personal structure. That

GEORGE DU MAURIER

;r

amusement is the brightest; the other is
often sad enough. A sharp critic might
accuse Mr. Du Maurjer of lingering too com
placently on the lines in question ; of hav
ing a certain ideal of " lissome " elongation
to which the promiscuous truth is some
times sacrificed. But in fact this artist's
truth never pretends to be promiscuous;
it is avowedly select and specific. What
he depicts is so preponderantly the " taper
ing " people that the remainder of the pict
ure, in a notice as brief as the present, may
be neglected. If his dramatis persoticc are
not all the tenants of drawing-rooms, they
are represente'. at least in some relation to
these. 'Any and his friends at the fancy
fair are in society for the time; the point
of introducing them is to show how the
contrast intensifies them. Of late years
Mr. Du Maurier has perhaps been a little
too docile to the muse of elegance ; the
idiosyncrasies of the "masher" and the
high girl with elbows have beguiled him into
occasional inattention to the doings of the
short and shabby. But his career has been
long and rich, and I allude, in such words,
but to a moment of it.

36

The moral of it— I refer to the artistic
one— seen altogether, is striking and edify
ing enough. What Mr. Du Maurier has at
tempted to do is to give, in a thousand in
terrelated drawings, a general satiric picture
of the social life of his time and country.
It is easy to see that through them " an in
creasing purpose runs ;" they all hang to
gether and refer to each other — complete,
confirm, correct, illuminate each other.
Sometimes they are not satiric : satire is
not pure charm, and the artist has allowed
himself to "go in " for pure charm. Some
times he has allowed himself to go in for
pure fantasy, so that satire (which should
hold on to the mane of the real) slides off
the other side of the runaway horse. But
he remains, on the whole, pencil in hand, a
wonderfully copious and veracious historian
of his age and his civilization.

VII

I have left Mr. Reinhart to the last be
cause of his importance, and now this very
importance operates as a restriction and
even as a sort of reproach to me. To go
well round him at a deliberate pace would
take a whole book. With Mr. Abbey, Mr.
Reinhart is the artist who has contributed
most abundantly to HARPER ; his work, in
deed, in quantity, considerably exceeds Mr.
Abbey's. He is the observer of the imme
diate, as Mr. Abbey is that of the considera
bly removed, and the conditions he asks us
to accept are less expensive to the imagina
tion than those of his colleague. He is, in
short, the vigorous, racy prosateur of that
human comedy of which Mr. Abbey is the
poet. He illustrates the modern sketch of
travel, the modern tale — the poor little
" quiet," psychological, conversational mod
ern tale, which I often think the artist in
vited to represent it to the eye must hate.

unless he be a very intelligent master, so
little, on a superficial view, would there ap
pear to be in it to represent. The super
ficial view is, after all, the natural one for
the picture -maker. A talent of the first
order, however, only wants to be set think
ing, as a single word will often make it.
Mr. Reinhart, at any rate, triumphs ; whether
there be life or not in the little tale itself,
there is unmistakable life in his version of
it. Mr. Reinhart deals in that element
purely with admirable frankness and vigor.
He is not so much suggestive as positively
and sharply representative. His facility,
his agility, his universality are a truly stim
ulating sight. He asks not too many ques
tions of his subject, but to those he does
ask he insists upon a thoroughly intelligible
answer. By his universality I mean per
haps as much as anything else his admira
ble drawing; not precious, as the aesthetic
say, nor pottering, as the vulgar, but free,
strong and secure, which enables him to do
with the human figure at a moment's no
tice anything that any occasion may de
mand. It gives him an immense range,
and I know not how to express (it is not

3.

easy) my sense of a certain capable indif
ference that is in him otherwise than by
saying that he would quite as soon do one
thing as another.

For it is true that the admirer of his
work rather misses in him that intimation
of a secret preference which many strong
draughtsmen show, and which is not absent,
for instance (I don't mean the secret, but
the intimation), from the beautiful doings
of Mr. Abbey. It is extremely present in
Mr. Du Maurier's work, just as it was visi
ble, less elusively, in that of John Leech, his
predecessor in Punch. Mr. Abbey has a
haunting type ; Du Maurier has a haunting
type. There was little perhaps of the
haunted about Leech, but we know very
well how he wanted his pretty girls, his
British swell, and his " hunting men " to
look. He betrayed a predilection ; he had
his little ideal. That an artist may be a
great force and not have a little ideal, the
scarcely too much to be praised Charles
Keene is there (I mean he is in Punch} to
show us. He has not a haunting type — not
he — and I think that no one has yet dis
covered how he would have liked his pret-

ty girls to look. He has kept the soft con
ception too much to himself — he has not
trifled with the common truth by letting it
appear. This common truth, in its innu
merable combinations, is what Mr. Rein-
hart also shows us (with of course infinitely
less of a parti pris of laughing at it), though,
as I must hasten to add, the female face
and form in his hands always happen to
take on a much lovelier cast than in Mr.
Keene's. These things with him, however,
are not a private predilection, an artist's
dream. Mr. Reinhart is solidly an artist,
but I doubt whether as yet he dreams, and
the absence of private predilections makes
him seem a little hard. He is sometimes
rough with our average humanity, and es
pecially rough with the feminine portion of
it. He usually represents American life, in
which that portion is often spoken of as
showing to peculiar advantage. But Mr.
Reinhart sees it generally, as very bourgeois.
His good ladies are apt to be rather thick
and short, rather huddled and plain. I
shouldn't mind it so much if they didn't
look so much alive. They are incontesta-
bly possible. The long, brilliant series of

drawings he made to accompany Mr. Charles
Dudley Warner's papers on the American
watering-places form a rich bourgeois epic,
which imaginations haunted by a type must
accept with philosophy, for the sketches in
question will have carried the tale, and all
sorts of irresistible illusion with it, to the
four corners of the earth. Full of observa
tion and reality, of happy impressionism,
taking all things as they come, with many a
charming picture of youthful juxtaposition,
they give us a sense, to which nothing need
be added, of the energy of Mr. Reinhart's
pencil. They are a final collection of pic
torial notes on the manners and customs,
the aspects and habitats, in July and August,
of the great American democracy ; of which,
certainly, taking one thing with another,
they give a very comfortable, cheerful ac
count. But they confirm that analytic view
of which I have ventured to give a hint —
the view of Mr. Reinhart as an artist of im
mense capacity who yet somehow doesn't
care. I must add that this aspect of him
is modified, in the one case very gracefully,
in the other by the operation of a sort of
constructive humor, remarkably strong, in

his illustrations of Spanish life and his
sketches of the Berlin political world.

His fashion of remaining outside, as it
were, makes him (to the analyst) only the
more interesting, for the analyst, if he have
any critical life in him, will be prone to
wonder why he doesn't care, and whether
matters may not be turned about in such a
way as that he should, with the conse
quence that his large capacity would be
come more fruitful still. Mr. Reinhart is
open to the large appeal of Paris, where he
lives — as is evident from much of his work —
where he paints, and where, in crowded ex
hibitions, reputation and honors have de
scended upon him. And yet Paris, for all
she may have taught him, has not given
him the mystic sentiment — about which I
am perhaps writing nonsense. Is it non
sense to say that, being very much an in
carnation of the modern international spir
it (he might be a Frenchman in New York
were he not an American in Paris), the mor
al of his work is possibly the inevitable
want of finality, of intrinsic character, in
that sweet freedom ? Does the cosmopo
lite necessarily pay for his freedom by a

43

want of function — the impersonality of not
being representative ? Must one be a little
narrow to have a sentiment, and very local
to have a quality, or at least a style ; and
would the missing type, if I may mention it
yet again, haunt our artist — who is some
how, in his rare instrumental facility, out
side of quality and style — a good deal more
if he were not, amid the mixture of associ
ations and the confusion of races, liable to
fall into vagueness as to what types are ?
He can do anything he likes; by which I
mean he can do wonderfully even the
things he doesn't like. But he strikes me
as a force not yet fully used.

1889

EDWIN A. ABBEY

'OTHING is more interesting in
the history of an artistic tal
ent than the moment at which
its " elective affinity " declares
itself, and the interest is great
in proportion as the declaration is unmis
takable. I mean by the elective affinity of
a talent its climate and period of preference,
the spot on the globe or in the annals of
mankind to which it most fondly attaches
itself, to which it reverts incorrigibly, round
which it revolves with a curiosity that is
insatiable, from which in short it draws its
strongest inspiration. A man may person
ally inhabit a certain place at a certain time,
but in imagination he may be a perpetual
absentee, and to a degree worse than the
worst Irish landlord, separating himself
from his legal inheritance not only by
mountains and seas, but by centuries as

well. When he is a man of genius these
perverse predilections become fruitful and
constitute a new and independent life, and
they are indeed to a certain extent the sign
and concomitant of genius. I do not mean
by this that high ability would always rath
er have been born in another country and
another age, but certainly it likes to choose,
it seldom fails to react against imposed
conditions. If it accepts them it does so
because it likes them for themselves; and
if they fail to commend themselves it rare
ly scruples to fly away in search of others.
We have witnessed this flight in many a
case ; I admit that if we have sometimes ap
plauded it we have felt at other moments
that the discontented, undomiciled spirit
had better have stayed at home.

Mr. Abbey has gone afield, and there
could be no better instance of a successful
fugitive and a genuine affinity, no more
interesting example of selection — selection
of field and subject — operating by that in
sight which has the precocity and certainty
of an instinct. The domicile of Mr. Ab
bey's genius is the England of the eighteenth
century; I should add that the palace of

art which he has erected there commands —
from the rear, as it were — various charming
glimpses of the preceding age. The finest
work he has yet done is in his admirable il
lustrations, in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, to "She
Stoops to Conquer," but the promise that
he would one day do it was given some
years ago in his delightful volume of de
signs to accompany Herrick's poems ; to
which we may add, as supplementary evi
dence, his drawings for Mr. William Black's
novel of "Jitdtth Shakespeare.

Mr. Abbey was born in Philadelphia in
1852, and manifesting his brilliant but un-
encouraged aptitudes at a very early age,
came in 1872 to New York to draw for
HARPER'S WEEKLY. Other views than
this, if I have been correctly informed, had
been entertained for his future — a fact that
provokes a smile now that his manifest des
tiny has been, or is in course of being, so
very neatly accomplished. The spirit of
modern aesthetics did not, at any rate, as I
understand the matter, smile upon his cra
dle, and the circumstance only increases
the interest of his having had from the ear
liest moment the clearest artistic vision.

It has sometimes happened that the distin
guished draughtsman or painter has been
born in the studio and fed, as it were, from
the palette, but in the great majority of
cases he has been nursed by the profane,
and certainly, on the doctrine of math
ematical chances, a Philadelphia genius
would scarcely be an exception. Mr. Ab
bey was fortunate, however, in not being
obliged to lose time ; he learned how to
swim by jumping into deep water. Even
if he had not known by instinct how to
draw, he would have had to perform the
feat from the moment that he found him
self attached to the " art department " of a
remarkably punctual periodical. In such a
periodical the events of the day are prompt
ly reproduced ; and with the morrow so near
the day is necessarily a short one — too short
for gradual education. Such a school is not,
no doubt, the ideal one, but in fact it may
have a very happy influence. If a youth is
to give an account of a scene with his pen
cil at a certain hour — to give it, as it were,
or perish — he will have become conscious,
in the first place, of a remarkable incentive
to observe it, so that the roughness of the

foster-mother who imparts the precious fac
ulty of quick, complete observation is really
a blessing in disguise. To say that it was
simply under this kind of pressure that Mr.
Abbey acquired the extraordinary refine
ment which distinguishes his work in black
and white is doubtless to say too much ;
but his admirers maybe excused, in view of
the beautiful result, for almost wishing, on
grounds of patriotism, to make the training,
or the absence of training, responsible for
as much as possible. For as no artistic
genius that our country has produced is
more delightful than Mr. Abbey's, so, surely,
nothing could be more characteristically
American than that it should have formed
itself in the conditions that happened to be
nearest at hand, with the crowds, streets
and squares, the railway stations and tele
graph poles, the wondrous sign-boards and
triumphant bunting, of New York for the
source of its inspiration, and with a big
hurrying printing-house for its studio. If
to begin the practice of art in these condi
tions was to incur the danger of being crude,
Mr. Abbey braved it with remarkable suc
cess. At all events, if he went neither

through the mill of Paris nor through that
of Munich, the writer of these lines more
than consoles himself for the accident. His
talent is unsurpassably fine, and yet we re
flect with complacency that he picked it up
altogether at home. If he is highly distin
guished he is irremediably native, and (pre
mising always that I speak mainly of his
work in black and white) it is difficult to
see, as we look, for instance, at the admira
ble series of his drawings for " She Stoops
to Conquer," what more Paris or Munich
could have done for him. There is a cer
tain refreshment in meeting an American
artist of the first order who is not a pupil
of Ger6me or of Cabanel.

Of course, I hasten to add, we must make
our account with the fact that, as I began
with remarking, the great development of
Mr. Abbey's powers has taken place amid
the brown old accessories of a country where
that eighteenth century which he presently
marked for his own are more profusely rep
resented than they have the good-fortune
to be in America, and consequently limit
our contention to the point that his talent
itself was already formed when this happy

initiation was opened to it. He went to
England for the first time in 1878, but it
was not all at once that he fell into the
trick, so irresistible for an artist doing his
special work, of living there. I must for
bid myself every impertinent conjecture,
but it may be respectfully assumed that Mr.
Abbey rather drifted into exile than com-
rnitted himself to it with malice prepense.
The habit, at any rate, to-day appears to be
confirmed, and, to express it roughly, he is
surrounded by the utensils and conven
iences that he requires. During these years,
until the recent period when he 'began to
exhibit at the water-color exhibitions, his
work has been done principally for HAR
PER'S MAGAZINE, and the record of it is to
be found in the recent back volumes. I
shall not take space to tell it over piece by
piece, for the reader who turns to the Mag
azine will have no difficulty in recognizing
it. It has a distinction altogether its own ;
there is always poetry, humor, charm, in the
idea, and always infinite grace and security
in the execution.

As I have intimated, Mr. Abbey never
deals with the things and figures of to-day;

his imagination must perform a wide back
ward journey before it can take the air.
But beyond this modern radius it breathes
with singular freedom and naturalness. At
a distance of fifty years it begins to be at
home ; it expands and takes possession ; it
recognizes its own. With all his ability,
with all his tact, it would be impossible to
him, we conceive, to illustrate a novel of
contemporary manners ; he would inevita
bly throw it back to the age of hair-powder
and post-chaises. The coats and trousers,
the feminine gear, the chairs and tables of
the current year, the general aspect of things
immediate and familiar, say nothing to his
mind, and there are other interpreters to
whom he is quite content to leave them.
He shows no great interest even in the
modern face, if there be a modern face
apart from a modern setting ; I am not sure
what he thinks of its complications and re
finements of expression, but he has certainly
little relish for its banal, vulgar mustache,
its prosaic, mercantile whisker, surmounting
the last new thing in shirt-collars. Dear to
him is the physiognomy of clean-shaven pe
riods, when cheek and lip and chin, abound-

ing in line and surface, had the air of solic
iting the pencil. Impeccable as he is in
drawing, he likes a whole face, with reason,
and likes a whole figure ; the latter not to
the exclusion of clothes, in which he delights,
but as the clothes of our great-grandfathers
helped it to be seen. No one has ever un
derstood breeches and stockings better than
he, or the human leg, that delight of the
draughtsman, as the costume of the last
century permitted it to be known. The pet
ticoat and bodice of the same period have as
little mystery for him, and his women and
girls have altogether the poetry of a by-gone
manner and fashion. They are not modern
heroines, with modern nerves and accom
plishments, but figures of remembered song
and story, calling up visions of spinet and
harpsichord that have lost their music to
day, high-walled gardens that have ceased
to bloom, flowered stuffs that are faded,
locks of hair that are lost, love-letters that
are pale. By which I don't mean that they
are vague and spectral, for Mr. Abbey has in
the highest degree the art of imparting life,
and he gives it in particular to his well-made,
blooming maidens. They live in a world in

which there is no question of their passing
Harvard or other examinations, but they
stand very firmly on their quaintly -shod
feet. They are exhaustively " felt," and em
inently qualified to attract the opposite sex,
which is not the case with ghosts, who, more
over, do not wear the most palpable petti
coats of quilted satin, nor sport the most
delicate fans, nor take generally the most
ingratiating attitudes.

The best work that Mr. Abbey has done
is to be found in the succession of illustra
tions to " She Stoops to Conquer;" here we
see his happiest characteristics and — till he
does something still more brilliant — may
take his full measure. No work in black
and white in our time has been more truly
artistic, and certainly no success more un
qualified. The artist has given us an evo
cation of a social state to its smallest details,
and done it with an unsurpassable lightness
of touch. The problem was in itself delight
ful — the accidents and incidents (granted a
situation de comtdie) of an old, rambling,
wainscoted, out-of-the-way English country-
house, in the age of Goldsmith. Here Mr.
Abbey is in his element — given up equally

to unerring observation and still more in
fallible divination. The whole place, and
the figures that come and go in it, live again,
with their individual look, their peculiari
ties, their special signs and oddities. The
spirit of the dramatist has passed complete
ly into the artist's sense, but the spirit of
the historian has done so almost as much.
Tony Lumpkin is, as we say nowadays, a
document, and Miss Hardcastle embodies
the results of research. Delightful are the
humor and quaintness and grace of all this,
delightful the variety and the richness of
personal characterization, and delightful,
above all, the drawing. It is impossible to
represent with such vividness unless, to
begin with, one sees ; and it is impossible to
see unless one wants to very much, or un
less, in other words, one has a great love.
Mr. Abbey has evidently the tenderest af
fection for just the old houses and the old
things, the old faces and voices, the whole
irrevocable human scene which the genial
hand of Goldsmith has passed over to him,
and there is no inquiry about them that he
is not in a position to answer. He is inti
mate with the buttons of coats and the

13

buckles of shoes ; he knows not only exactly
what his people wore, but exactly how they
wore it, and how they felt when they had it
on. He has sat on the old chairs and sofas,
and rubbed against the old wainscots, and
leaned over the old balusters. He knows
every mended place in Tony Lutnpkin's
stockings, and exactly how that ingenuous
youth leaned back on the spinet, with his
thick, familiar thumb out, when he present
ed his inimitable countenance, with a grin,
to Mr. Hastings, after he had set his fond
mother a-whimpering. (There is nothing
in the" whole series, by-the-way, better indi
cated than the exquisitely simple, half-
bumpkin, half- vulgar expression of Tony's
countenance and smile in this scene, unless it
be the charming arch yet modest face of Miss
Hardcastle, lighted by the candle she car
ries, as, still holding the door by which she
comes in, she is challenged by young Mar-
low to relieve his bewilderment as to where
he really is and what she really is.) In short,
if we have all seen " She Stoops to Conquer "
acted, Mr. Abbey has had the better fortune
of seeing it off the stage; and it is notice
able how happily he has steered clear of

56 '

the danger of making his people theatrical
types — mere masqueraders and wearers of
properties. This is especially the case with
his women, who have not a hint of the con
ventional paint and patches, simpering with
their hands in the pockets of aprons, but
are taken from the same originals from
which Goldsmith took them.

If it be asked on the occasion of this
limited sketch of Mr. Abbey's powers where,
after all, he did learn to draw so perfectly, I
know no answer but to say that he learned
it in the school in which he learned also to
paint (as he has been doing in these latest
years, rather tentatively at first, but with
greater and greater success)— the school of
his own personal observation. His draw
ing is the drawing of direct, immediate, so
licitous study of the particular case, without
tricks or affectations or any sort of cheap
subterfuge, and nothing can exceed the
charm of its delicacy, accuracy and elegance,
its variety and freedom, its clear, frank so
lution of difficulties. If for the artist it be
the foundation of every joy to know exactly
what he wants (as I hold it is indeed), Mr.
Abbey is, to all appearance, to be constantly

57

congratulated. And I apprehend that he
would not deny that it is a good -fortune
for him to have been able to arrange his
life so that his eye encounters in abundance
the particular cases of which I speak. Two
or three years ago, at the Institute of Paint
ers in Water-colors, in London, he exhibit
ed an exquisite picture of a peaceful old
couple sitting in the corner of a low, quiet,
ancient room, in the waning afternoon, and
listening to their daughter as she stands up
in the middle and plays the harp to them.
They are Darby and Joan, with all the poe
try preserved ; they sit hand in hand, with
bent, approving heads, and the deep recess
of the window looking into the garden
(where we may be sure there are yew-trees
clipped into the shape of birds and beasts),
the panelled room, the quaintness of the
fireside, the old-time provincial expression
of the scene, all belong to the class of ef
fects which Mr. Abbey understands su
premely well. So does the great russet
wall and high-pitched mottled roof of the
rural almshouse which figures in the ad
mirable water-color picture that he exhib
ited last spring. A group of remarkably

pretty countrywomen have been arrested in
front of it by the passage of a young soldier
— a raw recruit in scarlet tunic and white
ducks, somewhat prematurely conscious of
military glory. He gives them the benefit
of the goose-step as he goes; he throws
back his head and distends his fingers, pre
senting to the ladies a back expressive of
more consciousness of his fine figure than
of the lovely mirth that the artist has de
picted in their faces. Lovely is their mirth
indeed, and lovely are they altogether. Mr.
Abbey has produced nothing more charm
ing than this bright knot of handsome, tit
tering daughters of burghers, in their prime
val pelisses and sprigged frocks. I have,
however, left myself no space to go into the
question of his prospective honors as a
painter, to which everything now appears
to point, and I have mentioned the two
pictures last exhibited mainly because they
illustrate the happy opportunities with which
he has been able to surround himself. The
sweet old corners he appreciates, the russet
walls of moss-grown charities, the low
browed nooks of manor, cottage and par
sonage, the fresh complexions that flourish

in green, pastoral countries where it rains
not a little — every item in this line that
seems conscious of its pictorial use appeals
to Mr. Abbey not in vain. He might have
been a grandson of Washington Irving,
which is a proof of what I have already
said, that none of the young American
workers in the same field have so little as
he of that imperfectly assimilated foreign-
ness of suggestion which is sometimes re
garded as the strength, but which is also
in some degree the weakness, of the picto
rial effort of the United States. His execu
tion is as sure of itself as if it tested upon
infinite Parisian initiation, but his feeling
can best be described by saying that it is
that of our own dear mother-tongue. If
the writer speaks when he writes, and the
draughtsman speaks when he draws, Mr.
Abbey, in expressing himself with his pen
cil, certainly speaks pure English. He re
minds us to a certain extent of Meissonier,
especially the Meissonier of the illustrations
to that charming little volume of the Con
ies Rdmois, and the comparison is highly
to his advantage in the matter of freedom,
variety, ability to represent movement (Meis-

sonier's figures are stock-still), and facial
expression — above all, in the handling of
the female personage, so rarely attempted
by the French artist. But he differs from
the latter signally in the fact that though
he shares his sympathy as to period and
costume, his people are of another race and
tradition, and move in a world locally al
together different. Mr. Abbey is still young,
he is full of ideas and intentions, and the
work he has done may, in view of his time
of life, of his opportunities and the singu
lar completeness of his talent, be regarded
really as a, kind of foretaste and prelude.
It can hardly fail that he will do better
things still, when everything is so favor
able. Life itself is his subject, and that
is always at his door. The only obsta
cle, therefore, that can be imagined in Mr.
Abbey's future career is a possible embar
rassment as to what to choose. He has
hitherto chosen so well, however, that this
obstacle will probably not be insuperable.

CHARLES S. REINHART

jiSv-:E Americans are accused of
making too much ado about
our celebrities, of being demon-
stratively conscious of each
step that we take in the path
of progress; and the accusation has its
ground doubtless in this sense, that it is
possible among us to-day to become a ce
lebrity on unprecedentedlyeasy terms. This,
however, at the present hour is the case all
the world over, and it is difficult to see
where the standard of just renown remains
so high that the first stone may be cast. It
is more and more striking that the ma
chinery of publicity is so enormous, so con
stantly growing and so obviously destined
to make the globe small, in relation of the
objects, famous or obscure, which cover it,
that it procures for the smallest facts and
the most casual figures a reverberation to

be expected only in the case of a world-con
queror. The newspaper and the telegram
constitute a huge sounding-board, which
has, every day and every hour, to be made
to vibrate, to be fed with items, and the
diffusion of the items takes place on a scale
out of any sort of proportion to their intrin
sic importance. The crackle of common
things istransmuted into thunder — a thunder
perhaps more resounding in America than
elsewhere for the reason that the sheet of
tin shaken by the Jupiter of the Press has
been cut larger. But the difference is only
of degree, not of kind ; and if the system
we in particular have brought to perfection
would seem to be properly applied only to
Alexanders and Napoleons, it is not striking
that these adequate subjects present them
selves even in other countries. The end of
it all surely no man can see, unless it be
that collective humanity is destined to per
ish from a rupture of its tympanum. That
is a theme for a later hour, and meanwhile
perhaps it is well not to be too frightened.
Some of the items I just spoke of are, after
all, larger than others ; and if, as a general
thing, it is a mistake to pull up our reputa-

tions to see how they are growing, there
are some so well grown that they will bear
it, and others of a hardy stock even while
they are tender. We may feel, for instance,
comparatively little hesitation in extending
an importunate hand towards the fine young
sapling of which Mr. Reinhart is one of the
branches. It is a plant of promise, which
has already flowered profusely and the fra
grance of which it would be affectation not
to notice. Let us notice it, then, with can
dor, for it has all the air of being destined
to make the future sweeter.

The plant in question is of course simply
the art of illustration in black and white,
to which American periodical literature has
lately given such an impetus and which has
returned the good office by conferring a
great distinction on our magazines. In its
new phase the undertaking has succeeded ;
and it is not always that fortune descends
upon so deserving a head. Two or three
fine talents in particular have helped it to
succeed, and Mr. Reinhart is not the least
conspicuous of these. It would be idle for
a writer in HARPER to pretend to any dif
fidence of appreciation of his work ; for the

pages are studded, from many years back,
with the record of his ability. Mr. Rein-
hart took his first steps and made his first
hits in HARPER, which owes him properly a
portrait in return for so much portraiture. I
may exaggerate the charm and the impor
tance of the modern illustrative form, may
see in it a capacity of which it is not yet it
self wholly conscious, but if I do so Mr.
Reinhart is partly responsible for the aber
ration. Abundant, intelligent, interpretative
work in black and white is, to the sense of
the writer of these lines, one of the pleas-
antest things of the time, having only to
rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future.
This idea, I confess, is such as to lead
one to write not only sympathetically but
pleadingly about the artists to whom one
looks for confirmation of it. If at the same
time as we commemorate what they have
done we succeed in enlarging a little the
conception of what they may yet do, we
shall be repaid even for having exposed our
selves as fanatics — fanatics of the general
manner, I mean, not of particular represent
atives of it.

May not this fanaticism, in a particular

case, rest upon a sense of the resemblance
between the general chance, as it may be
called, of the draughtsman in black and
white, with contemporary life for his theme,
and the opportunity upon which the literary
artist brings another form to bear? The
forms are different, though with analogies ;
but the field is the same — the immense
field of contemporary life observed for an
artistic purpose. There is nothing so inter
esting as that, because it is ourselves; and
no artistic problem is so charming as to ar
rive, either in a literary or a plastic form, at
a close and direct notation of what we ob
serve. If one has attempted some such
exploit in a literary form, one cannot help
having a sense of union and comradeship
with those who have approached the ques
tion with the other instrument. This will
be especially the case if we happen to have
appreciated that instrument even to envy.
We may as well say it outright, we envy it
quite unspeakably in the hands of Mr. Rein-
hart and in those of Mr. Abbey. There is
almost no limit to the service to which we
can imagine it to be applied, and we find
ourselves wishing that these gentlemen may

be made adequately conscious of all the ad
vantages it represents. We wonder whether
they really are so; we are disposed even to
assume that they are not, in order to point
the moral, to insist on the lesson. The
master whom we have mentally in view —
Mr. Reinhart is a near approach to him —
may be, if he will only completely know it,
so prompt, so copious, so universal — so " all
there," as we say nowadays, and indeed so
all everywhere. There is only too much to
see, too much to do, and his process is the
one that comes nearest to minimizing the
quantity. He can touch so many things,
he can go from one scene to another, he
can sound a whole concert of notes while
the painter is setting up his easel. The
painter is majestic, dignified, academic, im
portant, superior, anything you will ; but
he is, in the very nature of the case, only
occasional. He is " serious," but he is com
paratively clumsy ; he is a terrible time get
ting under way, and he has to sacrifice so
many subjects while he is doing one. The
illustrator makes one immense sacrifice, of
course — that of color; but with it he pur
chases a freedom which enables him to at-

•-

tack ever so many ideas. It is by variety
and numerosity that he commends himself
to his age, and it is for these qualities that
his age commends him to the next. The
twentieth century, the latter half of it, will,
no doubt, have its troubles, but it will have
a great compensatory luxury, that of seeing
the life of a hundred years before much
more vividly than we — even happy we — see
the life of a hundred years ago. But for
this our illustrators must do their best, ap
preciate the endless capacity of their form.
It is to the big picture what the short story
is to the novel.

. It is doubtless too much, I hasten to add,
to ask Mr. Reinhart, for instance, to work
to please the twentieth century. The end
will not matter if he pursues his present
very prosperous course of activity, for it is
assuredly the fruitful vein, the one I express
the hope to see predominant, the portrayal
of the manners, types and aspects that sur
round us. Mr. Reinhart has reached that
happy period of life when a worker is in full
possession of his means, when he has done
for his chosen instrument everything he
can do in the way of forming it and render-

ing it complete and flexible, and has there
fore only to apply it with freedom, confi
dence and success. These, to our sense,
are the golden hours of an artist's life ;
happier even than the younger time when
the future seemed infinite in the light of
the first rays of glory, the first palpable hits.
The very sense that the future is not unlim
ited and that opportunity is at its high-
water-mark gives an intensity to the enjoy
ment of maturity. Then the acquired habit
of " knowing how" must simplify the prob
lem of execution and leave the artist free
to think only of his purpose, as befits a real
creator. Mr. Reinhart is at the enviable
stage of knowing in perfection how ; he has
arrived at absolute facility and felicity. The
machine goes of itself ; it is no longer nec
essary to keep lifting the cover and pouring
in the oil of fond encouragement: all the
attention may go to the idea and the sub
ject. It may, however, remain very inter
esting to others to know how the faculty
was trained, the pipe was tuned. The early
phases of such a process have a relative im
portance even when, at the time (so gradual
are many beginnings and so obscure many

a morrow) they may have appeared neither
delightful nor profitable. They are almost
always to be summed up in the single pre
cious word practice. This word represents,
at any rate, Mr. Reinhart's youthful history,
and the profusion in which, though no doubt
occasionally disguised, the boon was sup
plied to him in the offices of HARPER'S
MAGAZINE. There is nothing so innate that
it has not also to be learned, for the best
part of any aptitude is the capacity to in
crease it.

Mr. Reinhart's experience began to accu
mulate very early, for at Pittsburgh, where
he was born, he was free to draw to his
heart's content. There was no romantic at
tempt, as I gather, to nip him in the bud.
On the contrary, he was despatched with
almost prosaic punctuality to Europe, and
was even encouraged to make himself at
home in Munich. Munich, in his case, was a
pis-aller for Paris, where it would have been
his preference to study when he definitely
surrendered, as it were, to his symptoms.
He went to Paris, but Paris seemed blocked
and complicated, and Munich presented ad
vantages which, if not greater, were at least

easier to approach. Mr. Reinhart passed
through the mill of the Bavarian school, and
when it had turned him out with its char
acteristic polish he came back to America
with a very substantial stock to dispose of.
It would take a chapter by itself if we were
writing a biography, this now very usual
episode of the return of the young Ameri
can from the foreign conditions in which
he has learned his professional language,
and his position in face of the community
that he addresses in a strange idiom. There
has to be a prompt adjustment between ear
and voice, if the interlocutor is not to seem
to himself to be intoning in the void. There
is always an inner history in all this, as well
as an outer one — such, however, as it would
take much space to relate. Mr. Reinhart's
more or less alienated accent fell, by good-
fortune, on a comprehending listener. He
had made a satirical drawing, in the nature
of the "cartoon" of a comic journal, on a
subject of the hour, and addressed it to the
editor of HARPER'S WEEKLY. The draw
ing was not published — the satire was per
haps not exactly on the right note — but the
draughtsman was introduced. Thus began,

by return of post, as it were, and with pre
liminaries so few that they could not well
have been less, a connection of many years.
If I were writing a biography another chap
ter would come in here — a curious, almost
a pathetic one ; for the course of things is
so rapid in this country that the years of
Mr. Reinhart's apprenticeship to pictorial
journalism, positively recent as they are, al
ready are almost prehistoric. To-morrow,
at least, the complexion of that time, its
processes, ideas and standards, together with
some of the unsophisticated who carried
them out, will belong to old New York. A
certain mollifying dimness rests upon them
now, and their superseded brilliancy gleams
through it but faintly. It is a lively span
for Mr. Reinhart to have been at once one
of the unsophisticated and one of the actu
ally modern.

That portion of his very copious work to
which, more particularly, I apply the latter
term, has been done for HARPER'S MAGA
ZINE. During these latter years it has come,
like so much of American work to-day, from
beyond the seas. Whether or not that for
eign language of which I just spoke never

became, in New York, for this especial pos
sessor of it, a completely convenient medium
of conversation, is more than I can say ; at
any rate Mr. Reinhart eventually reverted
to Europe and settled in Paris. Paris had
seemed rather inhospitable to him in his
youth, but he has now fitted his key to the
lock. It would be satisfactory to be able to
express scientifically the reasons why, as a
general thing, the American artist, as well
as his congener of many another land, car
ries on his function with less sense of resist
ance in that city than elsewhere. He likes
Paris best, but that is not scientific. The dif
ference is that though theoretically the pro
duction of pictures is recognized in America
and in England, in Paris it is recognized
both theoretically and practically. And I
do not mean by this simply that pictures
are bought — for they are not, predominant
ly, as it happens — but that they are more
presupposed. The plastic is implied in the
French conception of things, and the studio
is as natural a consequence of it as the post-
office is of letter-writing. Vivid representa
tion is the genius of the French language
and the need of the French mind. The

people have invented more aids to it than
any other, and as these aids make up a large
part of the artist's life, he feels his best
home to be in the place where he finds them
most. He may begin to quarrel with that
home on the day a complication is intro
duced by the question of what he shall
represent — a totally different consideration
from that of the method; but for Mr. Rein-
hart this question has not yet offered insol
uble difficulties. He represents everything
— he has accepted so general an order. So
long as his countrymen flock to Paris and
pass in a homogeneous procession before his
eyes, there is not the smallest difficulty in
representing them. When the case requires
that they shall be taken in connection with
their native circumstances and seen in their
ambient air, he is prepared to come home
and give several months to the task, as on
the occasion of Mr. Dudley Warner's history
of a tour among the watering-places, to
which he furnished so rich and so curious a
pictorial accompaniment. Sketch-book in
hand, he betakes himself, according to need,
to Germany, to England, to Italy, to Spain.
Few readers of HARPER will have forgotten

his admirable pictorial notes on the political
world at Berlin, so rich and close in char
acterization. To the Spanish Vistas of Mr.
G. P. Lathrop he contributed innumerable
designs, delightful notes of an artist's quest
of the sketchable, many of which are singu
larly full pictures. The "Soldiers Playing
Dominoes " at a cafe is a powerful page of
life. Mr. Reinhart has, of course, interpreted
many afictive scene — he has been repeatedly
called upon to make the novel and the story
visible. This he energetically and patiently
does ; though of course we are unable to say
whether the men and women he makes us
see are the very people whom the authors
have seen. That is a thing that, in any case,
one will never know; besides, the authors
who don't see vaguely are apt to see per
versely. The story-teller has, at any rate,
the comfort with Mr. Reinhart that his
drawings are constructive and have the air
of the actual. He likes to represent char
acter — he rejoices in the specifying touch.

The evidence of this is to be found also
in his pictures, for I ought already to have
mentioned that, for these many years (they
are beginning to be many), he has indulged

in the luxury of color. It is not probable
that he regards himself in the first place as
an illustrator, in the sense to which the
term is usually restricted. He is a very vig
orous and various painter, and at the Salon
a constant and conspicuous exhibitor. He
is fond of experiments, difficulties and dan
gers, and I divine that it would be his prefer
ence to be known best by his painting, in
which he handles landscape with equal ve
racity. It is a pity that the critic is unable
to contend with him on such a point with
out appearing to underestimate that work.
Mr. Reinhart has so much to show for his
preference that I am conscious of its taking
some assurance to say that I am not sure he
is right. This would be the case even if he
had nothing else to show than the admi
rable picture entitled " Washed Ashore "
("Un Epave ") which made such an im
pression in the Salon of 1887. It represents
the dead body of an unknown man whom
the tide has cast up, lying on his back, feet
forward, disfigured, dishonored by the sea.
A small group of villagers are collected near
it, divided by the desire to look and the
fear to see. A gendarme, official and re-

sponsible, his uniform contrasting with the
mortal disrepair of the victim, takes down
in his note-book the prods-verbal of the
incident, and an old sailor, pointing away
with a stiffened arm, gives him the benefit
of what he knows about the matter. Plain,
pitying, fish-wives, hushed, with their shawls
in their mouths, hang back, as if from
a combination too solemn — the mixture
of death and the law. Three or four men
seem to be glad it isn't they. The thing
is a masterpiece of direct representation,
and has wonderfully the air of something
seen, found without being looked for. Ex
cellently composed but not artificial, deeply
touching but not sentimental, large, close
and sober, this important work gives the
full measure of Mr. Reinhart's great talent
and constitutes a kind of pledge. It may be
perverse on my part to see in it the big bank
note, as it were, which may be changed into
a multitude of gold and silver pieces. I
cannot, however, help doing so. " Washed
Ashore " is painted as only a painter paints,
but I irreverently translate it into its equiva
lent in " illustrations" — half a hundred lit
tle examples, in black and white, of the same

sort of observation. For this observation,
immediate, familiar, sympathetic, human,
and not involving a quest of style for which
color is really indispensable, is a mistress
at whose service there is no derogation in
placing one's self. To do little things in
stead of big may be a derogation ; a great
deal will depend upon the way the little
things are done. Besides, no work of art is
absolutely little. I grow bold and even im
pertinent as I think of the way Mr. Rein-
hart might scatter the smaller coin. At any
rate, whatever proportion his work in this
line may bear to the rest, it is to be hoped
that nothing will prevent him from turning
out more and more to play the rare faculty
that produces it. His studies of American
moeurs in association with Mr. Warner went
so far on the right road that we would fain
see him make all the rest of the journey.
They made us ask straightway for more,
and were full of intimations of what was be
hind. They showed what there is to see —
what there is to guess. Let him carry the
same inquiry further, let him carry it all the
way. It would be serious work and would
abound in reality ; it would help us, as it

were, to know what we are talking about.
In saying this I feel how much I confirm
the great claims I just made for the revival
of illustration.

ALFRED PARSONS

>T would perhaps be extravagant
to pretend, in this embarrassed
age, that Merry England is still
intact ; but it would be strange
if the words " happy England "
should not rise to the lips of the observer of
Mr. Alfred Parsons' numerous and delight
ful studies of the gardens, great and small,
of his country. They surely have a repre
sentative value in more than the literal
sense, and might easily minister to the
quietest complacency of patriotism. Peo
ple whose criticism is imaginative will see
in them a kind of compendium of what, in
home things, is at once most typical and
most enviable; and, going further, they will
almost wish that such a collection might
be carried by slow stages round the globe, to
kindle pangs in the absent and passions in
the alien. As it happens to be a globe the

English race has largely peopled, we can
measure the amount of homesickness that
would be engendered on the way. In fact,
one doubts whether the sufferer would even
need to be of English strain to attach the
vision of home to the essentially lovable
places that Mr. Parsons depicts. They
seem to generalize and typify the idea, so
that every one may feel, in every case, that
he has a sentimental property in the scene.
The very sweetness of its reality only helps
to give it that story-book quality which
persuades us we have known it in youth.

And yet such scenes may well have been
constructed for the despair of the Colonial ;
for they remind us, at every glance, of that
perfection to which there is no short cut —
not even " unexampled prosperity " — and to
which time is the only guide. Mr. Parsons'
pictures speak of many complicated things,
but (in what they tell us of his subjects)
they speak most of duration. Such happy
nooks have grown slowly, such fortunate
corners have had a history ; and their fort
une has been precisely that they have had
time to have it comfortably, have not been
obliged to try for character without it.

Character is their strong point and the
most expensive of all ingredients. Mr.
Parsons' portraiture seizes every shade of
it, seizes it with unfailing sympathy. He
is doubtless clever enough to paint rawness
when he must, but he has an irrepressible
sense of ripeness. Half the ripeness of
England — half the religion, one might al
most say — is in its gardens ; they are truly
pious foundations. It is doubtless because
there are so many of them that the coun-
. try seems so finished, and the sort of care
they demand is an intenser deliberation,
which passes into the national temper. One
must have lived in other lands to observe
fully how large a proportion of this one
is walled in for growing flowers. The Eng
lish love of flowers is inveterate ; it is the
most unanimous protest against the gray-
ness of some of the conditions, and it should
receive justice from those who accuse the
race of taking its pleasure too sadly. A
good garden is an organized revel, and
there is no country in which there are so
many.

Mr. Parsons had therefore only to choose,
at his leisure, and one might heartily have

6

envied him the process, scarcely knowing
which to prefer of all the pleasant pilgrim
ages that would make up such a quest. He
had, fortunately, the knowledge which could
easily lead to more, and a career of discov
ery behind him. He knew the right times
for the right things, and the right things for
the right places. He had innumerable mem
ories and associations ; he had painted up
and down the land and looked over many
walls. He had followed the bounty of the
year from month to month and from one-
profusion to another. To follow it with
him, in this admirable series, is to see that
he is master of the subject. There will be
no lack of confidence on the part of those
who have already perceived, in much of
Mr. Parsons' work, a supreme illustration
of all that is widely nature -loving in the
English interest in the flower. No sweeter
submission to mastery can be imagined than
the way the daffodils, under his brush (to
begin at the beginning), break out into early
April in the lovely drawings of Stourhead.
One of the most charming of these — a cor
ner of an old tumbled-up place in Wiltshire,
where many things have come and gone —

represents that moment of transition in
which contrast is so vivid as to make it
more dramatic than many plays — the very
youngest throb of spring, with the brown
slope of the foreground coming back to
consciousness in pale lemon-colored patches
and, on the top of the hill, against the still
cold sky, the equally delicate forms of the
wintry trees. By the time these forms have
thickened, the expanses of daffodil will have
become a mass of bluebells. All the daffo
dil pictures have a rare loveliness, but es
pecially those that deal also with the ear
lier fruit-blossom, the young plum-trees in
Berkshire orchards. Here the air is faintly
pink, and the painter makes us feel the lit
tle blow in the thin blue sky. The spring,
fortunately, is everybody's property and, in
the language of all the arts, the easiest
word to conjure with. It is therefore part
ly Mr. Parsons' good-luck that we enjoy so
his rendering of these phases ; but on the
other hand we look twice when it's a case
of meddling with the exquisite, and if he in
spires us with respect it is because we feel
that he has been deeply initiated.

No one knows better the friendly reasons

for our stopping, when chatting natives pro
nounce the weather " foine," at charming
casual corners of old villages, where grassy
ways cross each other and timbered houses
bulge irregularly and there are fresh things
behind crooked palings ; witness the little
vision of Blewbury, in Berkshire, reputedly
of ancient British origin, with a road all
round it and only footways within. No one,
in the Herefordshire orchards, masses the
white cow-parsley in such profusion under
the apple blossoms ; or makes the white
washed little damson -trees look so inno
cently responsible and charming on the
edge of the brook over which the planks
are laid for the hens. Delightful, in this
picture, is the sense of the clean spring day,
after rain, with the blue of the sky washed
faint. Delightful is the biggish view (one
of the less numerous oil -pictures) of the
Somersetshire garden, where that peculiarly
English look of the open-air room is pro
duced by the stretched carpet of the turf
and the firm cushions of the hedges, and a
pair of proprietors, perhaps happier than
they know, are putting in an afternoon
among their tulips, under the flushed apple-

trees whose stems are so thin and whose
brims so heavy. Are the absorbed couple,
at any rate, aware of the surprising degree
to which the clustered ruddy roofs of the
next small town, over the hedge, off at
the left, may remind the fanciful spectator
of the way he has seen little dim Italian
cities look on their hill-tops ? The whole
thing, in this subject, has the particular
English note to which Mr. Parsons repeat
edly testifies, the nook quality, the air of
a land and a life so infinitely subdivided
that they produce a thousand pleasant pri
vacies.

The painter moves with the months and
finds, after the earliest things, the great bed
of pansies in the angle of the old garden at
Sutton, in which, for felicity of position and
perfect pictorial service rendered — to say
nothing of its polygonal, pyramidal roof —
the ancient tool-house, or tea-house, is es
pecially to be commended. Very far de
scended is such a corner as this, very full of
reference to vanished combinations and
uses; and the artist communicates to us
a feeling for it that makes us wish disinter
estedly it may be still as long preserved.

86

He finds in June, at Blackdown, the blaze
of the yellow azalea -bush, or in another
spot the strong pink of the rhododendron,
beneath the silver firs that deepen the blue
of the sky. He finds the Vicarage Walk, at
King's Langley, a smother of old-fashioned
flowers — a midsummer vista for the figures
of a happy lady and a lucky dog. He finds
the delicious huddle of the gabled, pigeon-
haunted roof of a certain brown old build
ing at Frome, with poppies and gladiolus
and hollyhock crowding the beautiful fore
ground. He finds — apparently in the same
place — the tangle of the hardy flowers that
come while the roses are still in bloom, with
the tall blue larkspurs standing high among
them. He finds the lilies, white and red,
at Broadway, and the poppies, which have
dropped most of their petals — apparently to
let the roses, which are just coming out, give
their grand party. Their humility is re
warded by the artist's admirable touch in
the little bare poppy -heads that nod on
their flexible pins.

But I cannot go on to say everything that
such a seeker, such a discoverer, as Mr. Par
sons finds — the less that the purpose of these

ALFRED PARSONS

•;

limited remarks is to hint at our own trou
vailles, A view of the field, at any rate,
would be incomplete without such speci
mens as the three charming oil -pictures
which commemorate Holme Lacey. There
are gardens and gardens, and these represent
the sort that are always spoken of in the
plural and most arrogate the title. They
form, in England, a magnificent collection,
and if they abound in a quiet assumption of
the grand style it must be owned that they
frequently achieve it. There are people to
be found who enjoy them, and it is not, at
any rate, when Mr. Parsons deals with them
that we have an opening for strictures. As
we look at the blaze of full summer in the
brilliantly conventional parterres we easily
credit the tale of the 40,000 plants it takes
to fill the beds. More than this, we like
the long paths of turf that stretch between
splendid borders, recalling the frescoed
galleries of a palace ; we like the immense
hedges, whose tops are high against the
sky. While we are liking, we like per
haps still better, since they deal with a very
different order, the two water-colors from
the dear little garden at Winchelsea — es-

pecially the one in which the lady takes her
ease in her hammock (on a sociable, shady
terrace, from which the ground drops), and
looks at red Rye, across the marshes. An
other garden where a contemplative ham
mock would be in order is the lovely canon
ical plot at Salisbury, with the everlasting
spire above it tinted in the summer sky —
unless, in the same place, you should choose
to hook yourself up by the grassy bank of
the Avon, at the end of the lawn, with the
meadows, the cattle, the distant willows
across the river, to look at.

Three admirable water-colors are devoted
by Mr. Parsons to the perceptible dignity of
Gravetye, in Sussex, the dignity of very se
rious gardens, entitled to ceremonious con
sideration. Few things in England can show
a greater wealth of bloom than the wide flow
ery terrace immediately beneath the gray,
gabled house, where tens of thousands of
tea-roses, in predominant possession, have,
in one direction, a mass of high yews for a
background. They divide their province
with the carnations and pansies : a wilder
ness of tender petals ignorant of anything
rougher than the neighborhood of the big

ig

unchanged medley of tall yuccas and saxi
frage, with miscellaneous filling -in, in the
picture which presents the charming house
in profile. The artist shows us later, in
September, at Gravetye, the pale violet mul
titude of the Michaelmas daisies; another
great bunch, or bank, of which half masks
and greatly beautifies the rather bare yel
low cottage at Broadway. This brings us
on to the autumn, if I count as autumnal
the admirable large water-color of a part of
a garden at Shiplake, with the second bloom
of the roses and a glimpse of a turn of the
Thames. This exquisite picture expresses
to perfection the beginning of the languor
of the completed season— with its look of
warm rest, of doing nothing, in the cloudless
sky. To the same or a later moment belongs
the straight walk at Fladbury — the old rec
tory garden by the Avon, with its Irish yews
and the red lady in her chair ; also the charm
ing water-color of young, slim apple-trees,
full of fruit (this must be October), beneath
an admirable blue and white sky. Still later
comes the big pear-tree that has turned,
among barer boughs, to flame-color, and, in
another picture, the very pale russet of the

thinned cherry-trees, standing, beneath a
grayish sky, above a foreshortened slope.
Last of all we have, in oils, December and
a hard frost in a bare apple-orchard, indented
with a deep gully which makes the place
somehow a subject and which, in fact, three
or four years ago, made it one for a larger
picture by Mr. Parsons, full of truth and
style.

This completes his charming story of the
life of the English year, told in a way that
convinces us of his intimate acquaintance
with it. Half the interest of Mr. Parsons'
work is in the fact that he paints from a full
mind and from a store of assimilated knowl
edge. In every touch of nature that he com
municates to us we feel something of the
thrill of the whole — we feel the innumerable
relations, the possible variations of the par
ticular objects. This makes his manner se
rious and masculine — rescues it from the
thinness of tricks and the coquetries of chic.
We walk with him on a firm earth, we taste
the tone of the air and seem to take nature
and the climate and all the complicated
conditions by their big general hand. The
painter's manner, in short, is one with the

study of things — his talent is a part of their
truth. In this happy series we seem to see
still more how that talent was formed, how
his rich motherland has been, from the ear
liest observation, its nurse and inspirer. He
gives back to her all the good she has done
him.

JOHN S. SARGENT

WAS on the point of begin
ning this sketch of the work
of an artist to whom distinc
tion has come very early in life
by saying, in regard to the de
gree to which the subject of it enjoys the
attention of the public, that no American,
painter has hitherto won himself such rec
ognition from the expert ; but I find myself
pausing at the start as on the edge of a pos
sible solecism. Is 'Mr. Sargent in very fact
an American painter? The proper answer
to such a question is doubtless that we shall
be well advised to pretend it, and the reason
of this is simply that we have an excellent
opportunity. Born in Europe, he has also
spent his life in Europe, but none the less
the burden of proof would rest with those
who should undertake to show that he is a
European. Moreover he has even on the

face of it this great symptom of an Ameri
can origin, that in the line of his art he
might easily be mistaken for a Frenchman.
It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very
simple truth, that when to-day we look for
" American art " we find it mainly in Paris.
When we find it out of Paris, we at least
find a great deal of Paris in it. Mr. Sargent
came up to the irresistible city in his twen
tieth year, from Florence, where in 1856 he
had been born of American parents and
where his fortunate youth had been spent.
He entered immediately the studio of Caro-
lus Duran, and revealed himself in 1877, at
the age of twenty -two, in the portrait of
that master — a fine model in more than one
sense of the word. He was already in pos
session of a style ; and if this style has gained
both in finish and in assurance, it has not
otherwise varied. As he saw and "ren
dered " ten years ago, so he sees and ren
ders to-day; and I may add that there is
no present symptom of his passing into
another manner.

Those who have appreciated his work
most up to the present time articulate no
wish for a change, so completely does that

work seem to them, in its kind, the exact
translation of his thought, the exact "fit"
of his artistic temperament. It is difficult
to imagine a young painter less in the dark
about his own ideal, more lucid and more
responsible from the first about what he de
sires. In an altogether exceptional degree
does he give us the sense that the intention
and the art of carrying it out are for him
one and the same thing. In the brilliant
portrait of Carolus Duran, which he was
speedily and strikingly to surpass, he gave
almost the full measure of this admirable
peculiarity, that perception with him is al
ready by itself a kind of execution. It is
likewise so, of course, with many another
genuine painter ; but in Sargent's case the
process by which the object seen resolves
itself into the object pictured is extraordi
narily immediate. It is as if painting were
pure tact of vision, a simple manner of
feeling.

From the time of his first successes at
the Salon he was hailed, I believe, as a re
cruit of high value to the camp of the Im
pressionists, and to-day he is for many peo
ple most conveniently pigeon-holed under

•--

that head. It is not necessary to protest
against the classification if this addition
always be made to it, that Mr. Sargent's im
pressions happen to be worthy of record.
This is by no means inveterately the case
with those of the ingenuous artists who
most rejoice in the title in question. To
render the impression of an object may be
a very fruitful effort, but it is not necessa
rily so ; that will depend upon what, I won't
say the object, but the impression, may have
been. The talents engaged in this school
lie, not unjustly, as it seems to me, under
the suspicion of seeking the solution of
their problem exclusively in simplification.
If a painter works for other eyes as well as
his own he courts a certain danger in this
direction — that of being arrested by the
cry of the spectator : " Ah ! but excuse me ;
I myself take more impressions than that"
We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice
only when it is rich. Mr. Sargent simpli
fies, I think, but he simplifies with style,
and his Impression is the finest form of his
energy.

His work has been almost exclusively in
portraiture, and it has been his fortune to

96

paint more women than men ; therefore he
has had but a limited opportunity to repro
duce that generalized grand air with which
his view of certain figures of gentlemen in
vests the model, which is conspicuous in
the portrait of Carolus Duran, and of which
his splendid " Docteur Pozzi," the distin
guished Paris surgeon (a work not sent to
the Salon), is an admirable example. In
each of these cases the model has been of
a gallant pictorial type, one of the types
which strike us as made for portraiture
(which is by no means the way of all), as es
pecially appears, for instance, in the hand
some hands and frilled wrists of M. Carolus,
whose cane rests in his fine fingers as if it
were the hilt of a rapier. The most brilliant
of all Mr. Sargent's productions is the por
trait of a young lady, the magnificent pict
ure which he exhibited in 1881 ; and if it
has mainly been his fortune since to com
memorate the fair faces of women, there is
no ground for surprise at this sort of suc
cess on the part of one who had given so
signal a proof of possessing the secret of
the particular aspect that the contemporary
lady (of any period) likes to wear in the

eyes of posterity. Painted when he was
but four-and-twenty years of age, the pict
ure by which Mr. Sargent was represented
at the Salon of 1881 is a performance which
may well have made any critic of imagina
tion rather anxious about his future. In
common with the superb group of the chil
dren of Mr. Edward Boit, exhibited two
years later, it offers the slightly " uncanny "
spectacle of a talent which on the very
threshold of its career has nothing more to
learn. It is not simply precocity in the
guise of maturity — a phenomenon we very
often meet, which deceives us only for an
hour ; it is the freshness of youth combined
with the artistic experience, really felt and
assimilated, of generations. My admiration
for. this deeply distinguished work is such
that I am perhaps in danger of overstating
its merits; but it is worth taking into ac
count that to-day, after several years' ac
quaintance with them, these merits seem to
me more and more to justify enthusiasm.
The picture has this sign of productions of
the first order, that its style clearly would
save it if everything else should change —
our measure of its value of resemblance, its

7

expression of character, the fashion of dress,
the particular associations it evokes. It is
not only a portrait, but a picture, and it
arouses even in the profane spectator some
thing of the painter's sense, the joy of engag
ing also, by sympathy, in the solution of the
artistic problem. There are works of which
it is sometimes said that they are painters'
pictures (this description is apt to be in
tended invidiously), and the production of
which I speak has the good-fortune at once
to belong to this class and to give the
" plain man " the kind of pleasure that the
plain man looks for.

The young lady, dressed in black satin,
stands upright, with her right hand bent
back, resting on her waist, while the other,
with the arm somewhat extended, offers to
view a single white flower. The dress,
stretched at the hips over a sort of hoop,
and ornamented in front, where it opens on
a velvet petticoat with large satin bows,
has an old-fashioned air, as if it had been
worn by some demure princess who might
have sat for Velasquez. The hair, of which
the arrangement is odd and charming, is
disposed in two or three large curls fas-

tened at one side over the temple with a
comb. Behind the figure is the vague
faded sheen, exquisite in tone, of a silk cur
tain, light, undefined, and losing itself at
the bottom. The face is young, candid and
peculiar. Out of these few elements the
artist has constructed a picture which it is
impossible to forget, of which the most
striking characteristic is its simplicity, and
yet which overflows with perfection. Paint
ed with extraordinary breadth and freedom,
so that surface and texture are interpreted
by the lightest hand, it glows with life,
character and distinction, and strikes us as
the most complete — with one exception
perhaps — of the author's productions. I
know not why this representation of a
young girl in black, engaged in the casual
gesture of holding up a flower, should make
so ineffaceable an impression and tempt
one to become almost lyrical in its praise ;
but I remember that, encountering the pict
ure unexpectedly in New York a year or
two after it had been exhibited in Paris, it
seemed to me to have acquired an extraor
dinary general value, to stand for more ar
tistic truth than it would be easy to formu-

late. The language of painting, the tongue
in which, exclusively, Mr. Sargent expresses
himself, is a medium into which a consid
erable part of the public, for the simple and
excellent reason that they don't understand
it, will doubtless always be reluctant and
unable to follow him.

Two years before he exhibited the young
lady in black, in 1879, Mr. Sargent had
spent several months in Spain, and here,
even more than he had already been, the
great Velasquez became the god of his idol
atry. No scenes are more delightful to the
imagination than those in which we figure
youth and genius confronted with great
examples, and if such matters did not belong
to the domain of private life we might en
tertain ourselves with reconstructing the
episode of the first visit to the museum of
Madrid, the shrine of the painter of Philip
IV., of a young Franco-American worship
per of the highest artistic sensibility, ex
pecting a supreme revelation and prepared
to fall on his knees. It is evident that Mr.
Sargent fell on his knees and that in this
attitude he passed a considerable part of
his sojourn in Spain. He is various and

experimental; if 1 am not mistaken, he sees
each work that he produces in a light of
its own, not turning off successive portraits
according to some well-tried receipt which
has proved useful in the case of their pred
ecessors ; nevertheless there is one idea
that pervades them all, in a different degree,
and gives them a family resemblance — the
idea that it would be inspiring to know just
how Velasquez would have treated the
theme. We can fancy that on each occa
sion Mr. Sargent, as a solemn preliminary,
invokes him as a patron saint. This is not,
in my intention, tantamount to saying that
the large canvas representing the contor
tions of a dancer in the lamp-lit room of a
Posada, which he exhibited on his return
from Spain, strikes me as having come into
the world under the same star as those
compositions of the great Spaniard which
at Madrid alternate with his royal portraits.
This singular work, which has found an ap
preciative home in Boston, has the stamp of
an extraordinary energy and facility — of an
actual scene, with its accidents and peculi
arities caught, as distinguished from a com
position where arrangement and invention

have played their part. It looks like life,
but it looks also, to my view, rather like a
perversion of life, and has the quality of an
enormous " note " or memorandum, rather
than of a representation. A woman in a
voluminous white silk dress and a black
mantilla pirouettes in the middle of a dusky
room, to the accompaniment of her own
castanets and that of a row of men and
women who sit in straw chairs against the
whitewashed wall and thrum upon guitar
and tambourine or lift other castanets into
the air. She appears almost colossal, and
the twisted and inflated folds of her long
dress increase her volume. She simpers,
in profile, with a long chin, while she slants
back at a dangerous angle, and the lamp
light (it proceeds from below, as if she were
on a big platform) makes a strange play in
her large face. In the background the
straight line of black -clad, black -hatted,
white - shirted musicians projects shadows
against the wall, on which placards, guitars,
and dirty finger-marks display themselves.
The merit of this production is that the air
of reality is given in it with remarkable
breadth and boldness ; its defect it is diffi-

cult to express save by saying that it makes
the spectator vaguely uneasy and even un
happy — an accident the more to be regretted
as a lithe, inspired female figure, given up to
the emotion of the dance, is not intrinsically
a displeasing object. " El Jaleo " sins, in my
opinion, in the direction of ugliness, and, in
dependently of the fact that the heroine is
circling round incommoded by her petti
coats, has a want of serenity.

This is not the defect of the diarming,
dusky, white-robed person who, in the Tan
gerine subject exhibited at the Salon of 1880
(the fruit of an excursion to the African
coast at the time of the artist's visit to
Spain), stands on a rug, under a great white
Moorish arch, and from out of the shadows
of the large drapery, raised pentwise by her
hands, which covers her head, looks down,
with painted eyes and brows showing above
a bandaged mouth, at the fumes of a beau
tiful censer or chafing-dish placed on the
carpet. I know not who this stately Mahom
etan may be, nor in what mysterious do
mestic or religious rite she may be engaged ;
but in her muffled contemplation and her
pearl-colored robes, under her plastered ar-

cade, which shines in the Eastern light, she
transports and torments us. The picture is
exquisite, a radiant effect of white upon
white, of similar but discriminated tones.
In dividing the honor that Mr. Sargent
has won by his finest work between the por
trait of the young lady of 1881 and the group
of four little girls which was painted in 1882
and exhibited with the success it deserved
the following year, I must be careful to give
the latter picture not too small a share.
The artist has done nothing more felicitous
and interesting than this view of a rich, dim,
rather generalized French interior (the per
spective of a hall with a shining floor, where
screens and tall Japanese vases shimmer and
loom), which encloses the life and seems to
form the happy play-world of a family of
charming children. The treatment is emi
nently unconventional, and there is none of
the usual symmetrical balancing of the fig
ures in the foreground. The place is re
garded as a whole ; it is a scene, a compre
hensive impression ; yet none the less do the
little figures in their white pinafores (when
was the pinafore ever painted with that
power and made so poetic ?) detach them-

IDS

selves and live with a personal life. Two
of the sisters stand hand in hand at the
back, in the delightful, the almost equal,
company of a pair of immensely tall em
blazoned jars, which overtop them and seem
also to partake of the life of the picture ;
the splendid porcelain and the aprons of
the children shine together, while a mirror
in the brown depth behind them catches
the light. Another little girl presents her
self, with abundant tresses and slim legs,
her hands behind her, quite to the left ; and
the youngest, nearest to the spectator, sits
on the floor and plays with her doll. The
naturalness of the composition, the loveli
ness of the complete effect, the light, free
security of the execution, the sense it gives
us as of assimilated secrets and of instinct
and knowledge playing together — all this
makes the picture as astonishing a work on
the part of a young man of twenty-six as
the portrait of 1881 was astonishing on the
part of a young man of twenty-four.

It is these remarkable encounters that
justify us in writing almost prematurely of
a career which is not yet half unfolded.
Mr. Sargent is sometimes accused of a want

of " finish," but if finish means the last word
of expressiveness of touch, " The Hall with
the Four Children," as we may call it, may
stand as a permanent reference on this point.
If the picture of the Spanish dancer illus
trates, as it seems to me to do, the latent
dangers of the Impressionist practice, so
this finer performance shows what victories
it may achieve. And in relation to the lat
ter I must repeat what I said about the
young lady with the flower, that this is the
sort of work which, when produced in youth,
leads the attentive spectator to ask unan
swerable questions. He finds himself mur
muring, "Yes, but what is left?" and even
wondering whether it be an advantage to
an artist to obtain early in life such posses
sion of his means that the struggle with
them, discipline, tdtonnement, cease to ex
ist for him. May not this breed an irre
sponsibility of cleverness, a wantonness, an
irreverence — what is vulgarly termed a
" larkiness " — on the part of the youthful
genius who has, as it were, all his fortune
in his pocket? Such are the possibly su
perfluous broodings of those who are critical
even in their warmest admirations and who

sometimes suspect that it may be better
for an artist to have a certain part of his
property invested in unsolved difficulties.
When this is not the case, the question
with regard to his future simplifies itself
somewhat portentously. " What will he
do with it ?" we ask, meaning by the pro
noun the sharp, completely forged weapon.
It becomes more purely a question of re
sponsibility, and we hold him altogether to
a higher account. This is the case with Mr.
Sargent ; he knows so much about the art
of painting that he perhaps does not fear
emergencies quite enough, and that having
knowledge to spare he may be tempted to
play with it and waste it. Various, curious,
as we have called him, he occasionally tries
experiments which seem to arise from the
mere high spirits of his brush, and runs risks
little courted by the votaries of the literal,
who never expose their necks to escape
•from the common. For the literal and the
common he has the smallest taste; when
he renders an object into the language of
painting his translation is a generous par
aphrase.

As I have intimated, he has painted lit-

io8

tie but portraits ; but he has painted very
many of these, and I shall not attempt in
so few pages to give a catalogue of his
works. Every canvas that has come from
his hands has not figured at the Salon ;
some of them have seen the light at oth
er exhibitions in Paris ; some of them in
London (of which city Mr. Sargent is now
an inhabitant), at the Royal Academy and
the Grosvenor Gallery. If he has been
mainly represented by portraits there are
two or three little subject-pictures of which
1 retain a grateful memory. There stands
out in particular, as a pure gem, a small
picture exhibited at the Grosvenor, repre
senting a small group of Venetian girls of
the lower class, sitting in gossip together
one summer's day in the big, dim hall of a
shabby old palazzo. The shutters let in a
clink of light ; the scagliola pavement gleams
faintly in it; the whole place is bathed
in a kind of transparent shade. The girls
are vaguely engaged in some very humble
household work ; they are counting turnips
or stringing onions, and these small vege
tables, enchantingly painted, look as valu
able as magnified pearls. The figures are

extraordinarily natural and vivid ; wonder
fully light and fine is the touch by which
the painter evokes the small familiar Ve
netian realities (he has handled them with
a vigor altogether peculiar in various other
studies which I have not space to enumer
ate), and keeps the whole thing free from
that element of humbug which has ever
attended most attempts to reproduce the
idiosyncrasies of Italy. I am, however,
drawing to the end of my remarks without
having mentioned a dozen of those brilliant
triumphs in the field of portraiture with
which Mr. Sargent's name is preponderantly
associated. I jumped from his " Carolus
Duran " to the masterpiece of 1881 without
speaking of the charming " Madame Pail-
leron " of 1879, or the picture of this lady's
children the following year. Many, or
rather most, of Mr. Sargent's sitters have
been French, and he has studied the physi
ognomy of this nation so attentively that a
little of it perhaps remains in the brush
with which to-day, more than in his first
years, he represents other types. I have
alluded to his superb " Docteur Pozzi," to
whose very handsome, still youthful head

and slightly artificial posture he has given
so fine a French cast that he might be ex
cused if he should, even on remoter pre
texts, find himself reverting to it. This
gentleman stands up in his brilliant red
dressing - gown with the prestance of a
princely Vandyck. I should like to com
memorate the portrait of a lady of a cer
tain age and of an equally certain interest
of appearance — a lady in black, with black
hair, a black hat and a vast feather, which
was displayed at that entertaining little an
nual exhibition of the " Mirlitons," in the
Place Vendome. With the exquisite mod
elling of its face (no one better than Mr.
Sargent understands the beauty that resides
in exceeding fineness), this head remains in
my mind as a masterly rendering of the look
of experience — such experience as may be
attributed to a woman slightly faded and
eminently distinguished. Subject and treat
ment in this valuable piece are of an equal
interest, and in the latter there is an ele
ment of positive sympathy which is not al
ways in a high degree the sign of Mr. Sar
gent's work.

What shall I say of the remarkable can-

vas which, on the occasion of the Salon of
1884, brought the critics about our artist's
ears, the already celebrated portrait of " Ma
dame G. ?" It is an experiment of a highly
original kind, and the painter has had in
the case, in regard to what Mr. Ruskin
would call the " Tightness " of his attempt,
the courage of his opinion. A contestable
beauty, according to Parisian fame, the lady
stands upright besjde a table on which
her right arm rests, with her body almost
fronting the spectator and her face in com
plete profile. She wears an entirely sleeve
less dress of black satin, against which her
admirable left arm detaches itself ; the line
of her harmonious profile has a sharpness
which Mr. Sargent does not always seek,
and the crescent of Diana, an ornament in
diamonds, rests on her singular head. This
work had not the good-fortune to please
the public at large, and I believe it even ex
cited a kind of unreasoned scandal — an idea
sufficiently amusing in the light of some of
the manifestations of the plastic effort to
which, each year, the Salon stands sponsor.
This superb picture, noble in conception and
masterly in line, gives to the figure repre-

sented something of the high relief of the
profiled images on great friezes. It is a
work to take or to leave, as the phrase is,
and one in regard to which the question of
liking or disliking comes promptly to be set
tled. The author has never gone further in
being boldly and consistently himself.

Two of Mr. Sargent's recent productions
have been portraits of American ladies whom
it must have been a delight to paint ; I allude
to those of Lady Playfair and Mrs. Henry
White, both of which were seen in the Royal
Academy of 1885, and the former subse
quently in Boston, where it abides. These
things possess, largely, the quality which
makes Mr. Sargent so happy as a painter of
women — a quality which can best be ex
pressed by a reference to what it is not, to
the curiously literal, prosaic, sexless treat
ment to which, in the commonplace work
that looks down at us from the walls of al
most all exhibitions, delicate feminine ele
ments' have evidently so often been sacri
ficed. Mr. Sargent handles these elements
with a special feeling for them, and they
borrow a kind of noble intensity from his
brush. This intensity is not absent from

"3

the two portraits I just mentioned, that of
Lady Playfair and that of Mrs. Henry White;
it looks out at us from the erect head and
frank animation of the one, and the silvery
sheen and shimmer of white satin and white
lace which form the setting of the slim tall-
ness of the other. In the Royal Academy
of 1886 Mr. Sargent was represented by
three important canvases, all of which re
minded the spectator of how much the brill
iant effect he produces in an English ex
hibition arises from a certain appearance
that he has of looking down from a height,
a height of cleverness, a sensible giddiness
of facility, at the artistic problems of the
given case. Sometimes there is even a slight
impertinence in it ; that, doubtless, was the
impression of many of the people who
passed, staring, with an ejaculation, before
the triumphant group of the three Misses
V. These young ladies, seated in a row,
with a room much foreshortened for a back
ground, and treated with a certain familiar
ity of frankness, excited in London a chorus
of murmurs not dissimilar to that which it
had been the fortune of the portrait exhib
ited in 1884 to elicit in Paris, and had the

further privilege of drawing forth some
prodigies of purblind criticism. Works of
this- character are a genuine service ; after
the short-lived gibes of the profane have
subsided, they are found to have cleared the
air. They remind people that the faculty
of taking a direct, independent, unborrowed
impression is not altogether lost.

In this very rapid review I have accom
panied Mr. Sargent to a very recent date.
If I have said that observers encumbered
with a nervous temperament may at any
moment have been anxious about his future,
I have it on my conscience to add that the
day has not yet come for a complete extinc
tion of this anxiety. Mr. Sargent is so young,
in spite of the place allotted to him in these
pages, so often a record of long careers and
uncontested triumphs that, in spite also of
the admirable works he has already pro
duced, his future is the most valuable thing
he has to show. We may still ask ourselves
what he will do with it, while we indulge
the hope that he will see fit to give succes
sors to the two pictures which I have spoken
of emphatically as his finest. There is no
greater work of art than a great portrait — a

truth to be constantly taken to heart by a
painter holding in his hands the weapon
that Mr. Sargent wields. The gift that he
possesses he possesses completely — the im
mediate perception of the end and of the
means. Putting aside the question of the
subject (and to a great portrait a common
sitter will doubtless not always contribute),
the highest result is achieved when to this
element of quick perception a certain faculty
of brooding reflection is added. I use this
name for want of a better, and I mean the
quality in the light of which the artist sees
deep into his subject, undergoes it, abscfrbs
it, discovers in it new things that were not
on the surface, becomes patient with it, and
almost reverent, and, in short, enlarges and
humanizes the technical problem.

1887.

HONORE DAUMIER

^S we attempt, at the present day,
to write the history of every
thing, it would be strange if
we had happened to neglect
the annals of caricature ; for
the very essence of the art of Cruikshank
and Gavarni, of Daumier and Leech, is to
be historical ; and every one knows how
addicted is this great science to discoursing
about itself. Many industrious seekers, in
England and France, have ascended the
stream of time to the source of the modern
movement of pictorial satire. The stream
of time is in this case mainly the stream of
journalism ; for social and political carica
ture, as the present century has practised
it, is only journalism made doubly vivid.

The subject indeed is a large one, if we
reflect upon it, for many people would tell
us that journalism is the greatest invention

of our age. If this rich affluent has shared
the great fortune of the general torrent, so,
on other sides, it touches the fine arts,
touches manners, touches morals. All this
helps to account for its inexhaustible life ;
journalism is the criticism of the moment
at the moment, and caricature is that criti
cism at once simplified and intensified by
a plastic form. We know the satiric image
as periodical, and above all as punctual —
the characteristics of the printed sheet with
which custom has at last inveterately asso
ciated it.

This, by-the-way, makes us wonder con
siderably at the failure of caricature to
achieve, as yet, a high destiny in America —
a failure which might supply an occasion for
much explanatory discourse, much search
ing of the relations of things. The news
paper has been taught to flourish among us
as it flourishes nowhere else, and to flourish
moreover on a humorous and irreverent
basis ; yet it has never taken to itself this
helpful concomitant of an unscrupulous
spirit and a quick periodicity. The expla
nation is probably that it needs an old soci
ety to produce ripe caricature. The news-

n8

paper thrives in the United States, but
journalism languishes ; for the lively propa
gation of news is one thing and the large
interpretation of it is another. A society
has to be old before it becomes critical, and
it has to become critical before it can take
pleasure in the reproduction of its incon
gruities by an instrument as impertinent
as the indefatigable crayon. _Irpny, scejati-
cism, pessimism are, in any particular soil,
plants of gradual growth, and it is in the
art of caricature that they flower most ag
gressively. Furthermore they must be wa
tered by education — I mean by the educa
tion of the eye and hand — all of which
things take time. The soil must be rich
too, the incongruities must swarm. It is
open to doubt whether a pure democracy is
very liable to make this particular satiric re-
turnupon itself ; for which itwould seem that
certain social complications are indispensa
ble. These complications are supplied from
the moment a democracy becomes, as we
may say, impure from its own point of view ;
from the moment variations and heresies,
deviations or perhaps simple affirmations of
taste and temper begin to multiply within

it. Such things afford a point d'appiti ; for
it is evidently of the essence of caricature
to be reactionary. We hasten to add that
its satiric force varies immensely in kind
and in degree according to the race, or to
the individual talent, that takes advantage
of it.

I used just now the term pessimism ; but
thaj; was doubtless in a great measure be
cause I have been turning over a collection
of the extraordinarily vivid drawings of
Honore Daumier. The same impression
would remain with me, no doubt, if I had
been consulting an equal quantity of the
work of Gavarni, the wittiest, the most liter
ary and most acutely profane of all chartered
mockers with the pencil. The feeling of dis
respect abides in all these things, the ex
pression of the spirit for which humanity is
definable primarily by its weaknesses. For
Daumier these weaknesses are altogether
ugly and grotesque, while for Gavarni they
are either basely graceful or touchingly
miserable; but the vision of them in both
cases is close and direct. If, on the other
hand, we look through a dozen volumes of
the collection of Punch we get an equal im-

pression of hilarity, but we by no means
get an equal impression of irony. Certain
ly the pages of Punch do not reek with
pessimism; their "criticism of life" is gen
tle and forbearing. Leech is positively op
timistic ; there is at any rate nothing infi
nite in his irreverence ; it touches bottom
as soon as it approaches the pretty woman
or the nice girl. It is such an apparition
as this that really, in Gavarni, awakes the
scoffer. Du Maurier is as graceful as Ga
varni, but his sense of beauty conjures away
almost everything save our minor vices.
It is in the exploration of our major ones
that Gavarni makes his principal discov
eries of charm or of absurdity of attitude.
None the less, of course, the general inspi
ration of both artists is the same : the de
sire to try the innumerable different ways
in which the human subject may not be
taken seriously.

If this view of that subject, in its plastic
manifestations, makes history of a sort, it
will not in general be of a kind to convert
those persons who find history sad reading.
The writer of the present lines remained
unconverted, lately, on an occasion on which

many cheerful influences were mingled with
his impression. They were of a nature to
which he usually does full justice, even over
estimating perhaps their charm of suggest
ion ; but, at the hour I speak of, the old
Parisian quay, the belittered print-shop, the
pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of the great
Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in
the interstices of the sallow estampes sus
pended in window and doorway— all these
elements of a rich actuality availed only to
mitigate, without transmuting, that general
vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced
itself together as I drew' specimen after
specimen from musty portfolios. I had
been passing the shop when I noticed in a
small vttrt'ne, let into the embrasure of the
doorway, half a dozen soiled, striking litho
graphs, which it took no more than a first
glance to recognize as the work of Daumier.
They were only old pages of the Charivari,
torn away from the text and rescued from
the injury of time ; and they were accom
panied with an inscription to the effect that
many similar examples of the artist were to
be seen within. To become aware of this
circumstance was to enter the shop and

to find myself promptly surrounded with
bulging cartons and tattered relics. These
relics — crumpled leaves of the old comic
journals of the period from 1830 to 1855 —
are neither rare nor expensive ; but I hap
pened to have lighted on a particularly copi
ous collection, and I made the most of my
small good -fortune, in order to transmute
it, if possible, into a sort of compensation
for my having missed unavoidably, a few
months before, the curious exhibition "de
la Caricature Moderne " held for several
weeks just at hand, in the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts. Daumier was said to have appeared
there in considerable force ; and it was a
loss not to have had that particular oppor
tunity of filling one's mind with him.

There was perhaps a perversity in having
wished to do so, strange, indigestible stuff
of contemplation as he might appear to be ;
but the perversity had had an honorable
growth. Daumier's great days were in the
reign of Louis-Philippe ; but in the early
years of the Second Empire he still plied
his coarse and formidable pencil. I recalled,
from a juvenile consciousness, the last fail
ing strokes of it. They used to impress me

in Paris, as a child, with their abnormal
blackness as well as with their grotesque,
magnifying movement, and there was some
thing in them that rather scared a very
immature admirer. This small personage,
however, was able to perceive later, when
he was unfortunately deprived of the chance
of studying them, that there were various
things in them besides the power to ex
cite a vague alarm. Daumier was perhaps
a great artist ; at all events unsatisfied curi
osity increased in proportion to that possi
bility.

The first complete satisfaction of it was
really in the long hours that I spent in the
little shop on the quay. There I filled my
mind with him, and there too, at no great
cost, I could make a big parcel of these cheap
reproductions of his work. This work had
been shown in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as
it came from his hand ; M. Champfleury,
his biographer, his cataloguer and devotee,
having poured forth the treasures of a pre
cious collection, as I suppose they would
be called in the case of an artist of higher
flights. It was only as he was seen by the
readers of the comic journals of his day

I24

that I could now see him ; but I tried to
make up for my want of privilege by pro
longed immersion. I was not able to take
home all the portfolios from the shop on
the quay, but I took home what I could,
and I went again to turn over the superan
nuated piles. I liked looking at them on
the spot ; I seemed still surrounded by the
artist's vanished Paris and his extinct Pari
sians. Indeed no quarter of the delightful
city probably shows, on the whole, fewer
changes from the aspect it wore during the
period of Louis-Philippe, the time when it
will ever appear to many of its friends to
have been most delightful. The long line
of the quay is unaltered, and the rare charm
of the river. People came and went in the
shop : it is a wonder how many, in the course
of an hour, may lift the latch even of an es
tablishment that pretends to'no great busi
ness. What was all this small, sociable,
contentious life but the great Daumier's
subject-matter ? He was the painter of the
Parisian bourgeois, and the voice of the
bourgeois was in the air.

M. Champfleury has given a summary of
Daumier's career in his smart little Histoire

de la Caricature Moderne, a record not at all
abundant in personal detail. The biogra
pher has told his story better perhaps in his
careful catalogue of the artist's productions,
the first sketch of which is to be found
in L'Art for 1878. This copious list is
Daumier's real history; his life cannot have
been a very different business from his
work. I read in the interesting publication
of M. Grand-Carteret (Les M&urs et la Cari
cature en France, 1888) that our artist pro
duced nearly 4000 lithographs and a thou
sand drawings on wood, up to the time
when failure of eyesight compelled him to
rest. This is not the sort of activity that
leaves a man much time for independent
adventures, and Daumier was essentially of
the type, common in France, of the specialist
so immersed in his specialty that he can be
painted in only one attitude — a general cir
cumstance which perhaps helps to account
for the paucity, in that country, of biogra
phy, in our English sense of the word, in
proportion to the superabundance of criti
cism.

Honore Daumier was born at Marseilles
February 26th, 1808 ; he died on the i ith of

the same month, 1879. His main activity,
however, was confined to the earlier por
tion of a career of almost exactly seventy-
one years, and I find it affirmed in Vape-
reau's Dictionnaire des Contemporains that
he became completely blind between 1850
and 1860. He enjoyed a pension from the
State of 2400 francs ; but what relief from
misery could mitigate a quarter of a cen
tury of darkness for a man who had looked
out at the world with such vivifying eyes ?
His father had followed the trade of a gla
zier, but was otherwise vocal than in the
emission of the rich street-cry with which
we used all to be familiar, and which has
vanished with so many other friendly pedes
trian notes. The elder Daumier wrought
verses as well as window - panes, and M.
Champfleury has disinterred a small vol
ume published by him in 1823. The merit
of his poetry is not striking; but he was
able to transmit the artistic nature to his
son, who, becoming promptly conscious of
it, made the inevitable jo'urney to Paris in
search of fortune.

The young draughtsman appeared to have
missed at first the way to this boon ; inas-

much as in the year 1832 he found himself
condemned to six months' imprisonment
for a lithograph disrespectful to Louis-Phi
lippe. This drawing had appeared in the Ca
ricature, an organ of pictorial satire found
ed in those days by one Philipon, with the
aid of a band of young mockers to whom he
gave ideas and a direction, and several oth
ers, of whom Gavarni, Henry Monnier, De
camps, Grandville, were destined to make
themselves a place. M. Eugene Montro-
sier, in a highly appreciative article on Dau-
mier in L'Art for 1878, says that this same
Philipon was le journalisme fait homme ;
which did not prevent him — rather in fact
fostered such a result — from being perpet
ually in delicate relations with the govern
ment. He had had many horses killed un
der him, and had led a life of attacks,
penalties, suppressions' and resurrections.
He subsequently established the Charivari
and launched a publication entitled L 'As
sociation Lithographiqite Mensuclle, which
brought to light much of Daumier's early
work. The artist passed rapidly from seek
ing his way to finding it, and from an in
effectual to a vigorous form.

128

In this limited compass and in the case
of such a quantity of production it is almost
impossible to specify — difficult to pick
dozens of examples out of thousands. Dau-
mier became more and more the political
spirit of the Charivari, or at least the po
litical pencil, for M. Philipon, the breath of
whose nostrils was opposition — one per
ceives from here the little bilious, bristling,
ingenious, insistent man — is to be credited
with a suggestive share in any enterprise in
which he had a hand. This pencil played
over public life, over the sovereign, the min
isters, the deputies, the peers, the judiciary,
the men and the measures, the reputations
and scandals of the moment, with a strange,
ugly, extravagant, but none the less sane
and manly vigor. Daumier's sign is strength
above all, and in turning over his pages
to-day there is no intensity of force that
the careful observer will not concede to
him. It is perhaps another matter to as
sent to the proposition, put forth by his
greatest admirers among his countrymen,
that he is the first of all caricaturists. To
the writer of this imperfect sketch he re
mains considerably less interesting than

Gavarni ; and for a particular reason, which
it is difficult to express otherwise than by
saying that he is too simple. Simplicity
was not Gavarni 's fault, and indeed to a
large degree it was Daumier's merit. The
single grossly ridiculous or almost haunt-
ingly characteristic thing which his figures
represent is largely the reason why they
still represent life and an unlucky reality
years after the names attached to them
have parted with a vivifying power. Such
vagueness has overtaken them, for the most
part, and to such a thin reverberation have
they shrunk, the persons and the affairs
which were then so intensely sketchable.
Daumier handled them with a want of cer
emony which would have been brutal were
it not for the element of science in his
work, making them immense and unmis
takable in their drollery, or at least in their
grotesqueness ; for the term drollery sug
gests gayety, and Daumier is anything but
gay. Un rude petntre de masurs, M. Champ-
fleury calls him ; and the phrase expresses
his extreme breadth of treatment.

Of the victims of his " rudeness " M.
Thiers is almost the only one whom the

9

present generation may recognize without
a good deal of reminding, and indeed his
hand is relatively light in delineating this
personage of few inches and many episodes.
M. Thiers must have been dear to the cari
caturist, for he belonged to the type that
was easy to " do ;" it being well known that
these gentlemen appreciate public charac
ters in direct proportion to their saliency
of feature. When faces are reducible to a
few telling strokes their wearers are over
whelmed with the honors of publicity; with
which, on the other hand, nothing is more
likely to interfere than the possession of a
countenance neatly classical. Daumier had
only to give M. Thiers the face of a clever
owl, and the trick was played. Of course
skill was needed to individualize the sym
bol, but that is what caricaturists propose
to themselves. Of how well he succeeded
the admirable plate of the lively little min
ister in a " new dress " — tricked out in the
uniform of a general of the First Republic
— is a sufficient illustration. The bird of
night is not an acute bird, but how the art
ist has presented the image of a selected
specimen ! And with what a life-giving pen-

cil the whole figure is put on its feet, what
intelligent drawing, what a rich, free stroke !
The allusions conveyed in it are to such for
gotten things that it is strange to think the
personage was, only the other year, still con
temporaneous ; that he might have been
met, on a fine day, taking a few firm steps in
a quiet part of the Champs Elysees, with
his footman carrying a second overcoat and
looking doubly tall behind him. In what
ever attitude Daumier depicts him, planted
as a tiny boxing- master at the feet of the
virtuous colossus in a blouse (whose legs are
apart, like those of the Rhodian), in whom
the artist represents the People, to watch
the match that is about to come off between
Ratapoil and M. Berryer, or even in the act
of lifting the " parricidal " club of a new re
pressive law to deal a blow at the Press, an
effulgent, diligent, sedentary muse (this pict
ure, by the way, is a perfect specimen of the
simple and telling in political caricature) —
however, as I say, he takes M. Thiers, there
is always a rough indulgence in his crayon,
as if he were grateful to him for lending
himself so well.
He invented Ratapoil as he appropriated

Robert Macaire, and as a caricaturist he
never fails to put into circulation, when he
can, a character to whom he may attribute
as many as possible of the affectations or
the vices of the day. Robert Macaire, an
imaginative, a romantic rascal, was the hero
of a highly successful melodrama written
for Frederick Lemaitre ; but Daumier made
him the type of the swindler at large in an
age of feverish speculation — the projector of
showy companies, the advertiser of worth
less shares. There is a whole series of
drawings descriptive of his exploits, a hun
dred masterly plates which, according to M.
Champfleury, consecrated Daumier's repu
tation. The subject, the legend, was in most
cases, still according to M. Champfleury,
suggested by Philipon. Sometimes it was
very witty ; as for instance when Bertrand,
the muddled acolyte or scraping second fid
dle of the hero, objects, in relation to a
brilliant scheme which he has just devel
oped, with the part Bertrand is to play, that
there are constables in the country, and he
promptly replies, " Constables ? So much
the better — they'll take the shares !" Rata-
poil was an evocation of the same general

character, but with a difference of nuance —
the ragged political bully, or hand-to-mouth
demagogue, with the smashed tall hat,
cocked to one side, the absence of linen,
the club half-way up his sleeve, the swag
ger and pose of being gallant for the people.
Ratapoil abounds in the promiscuous draw
ings that I have looked over, and is always
very strong and living, with a considerable
element of the sinister, so often in Daumier
an accompaniment of the comic. There is
an admirable page — it brings the idea down
to 1851 — in which a sordid but astute peas
ant, twirling his thumbs on his stomach and
looking askance, allows this political ad
viser to urge upon him in a whisper that
there is not a minute to lose — to lose for
action, of course — if he wishes to keep his
wife, his house, his field, his heifer and his
calf. The canny scepticism in the ugly,
half -averted face of the typical rustic who
considerably suspects his counsellor is indi
cated by a few masterly strokes.

This is what the student of Daumier rec
ognizes as his science, or, if the word has a
better grace, his art. It is what has kept
life in his work so long after so many of the

134

occasions of it have been swept into dark
ness. Indeed, there is no such commentary
on renown as the " back numbers " of a comic
journal. They show us that at certain mo
ments certain people were eminent, only
to make us unsuccessfully try to remember
what they were eminent/b^. And the com
parative obscurity (comparative, I mean, to
the talent of the caricaturist) overtakes even
the most justly honored names. M. Berryer
was a splendid speaker and a public servant
of real distinction and the highest utility;
yet the fact that to-day his name is on few
men's lips seems to be emphasized by this
other fact that we continue to pore over
Daumier, in whose plates we happen to come
across him. It reminds one afresh how Art
is an embalmer, a magician, whom we can
never speak too fair. People duly impressed
with this truth are sometimes laughed at
for their superstitious tone, which is pro
nounced, according to the fancy of the critic,
mawkish, maudlin or hysterical. But it is
really difficult to see how any reiteration of
the importance of art can overstate the plain
facts. It prolongs, it preserves, it conse
crates, it raises from the dead. It concili-

'35

ates, charms, bribes posterity ; and it mur
murs to mortals, as the old French poet
sang to his mistress, " You will be fair only
so far as I have said so." When it whispers
even to the great, " You depend upon me,
and I can do more for you, in the long-run,
than any one else," it is scarcely too proud.
It puts method and power and the strange,
real, mingled air of things into Daumier's
black sketchiness, so full of the technical
gras, the "fat" which French critics com
mend and which we have no word to ex
press. It puts power above all, and the
effect which he best achieves, that of a cer
tain simplification of the attitude or the
gesture to an almost symbolic generality.
His persons represent only one thing, but
they insist tremendously on that, and their
expression of it abides with us, unaccom
panied with timid detail. It may really be
said that they represent only one class —
the old and ugly ; so that there is proof
enough of a special faculty in his having
played such a concert, lugubrious though it
be, on a single chord. It has been made a
reproach to him, says M. Grand-Carteret,
that "his work is lacking in two capital ele-

136

ments — la jeunesse et la femme ;" and this
commentator resents his being made to suf
fer for the deficiency — " as if an artist could
be at the same time deep, comic, graceful
and pretty ; as if all those who have a real
value had not created for themselves a form
to which they remain confined and a type
which they reproduce in all its variations,
as soon as they have touched the aesthetic
ideal that has been their dream. Assuredly,
humanity, as this great painter saw it, could
not be beautiful ; one asks one's self what a
maiden in her teens, a pretty face, would
have done in the midst of these good, plain
folk, stunted and elderly, with faces like
wrinkled apples. A simple accessory most
of the time, woman is for him merely a ter
magant or a blue-stocking who has turned
the corner."

When the eternal feminine, for Daumier,
appears in neither of these forms he sees it
in Madame Chaboulard or Madame Fribo-
chon, the old snuff-taking, gossiping por
tress, in a nightcap and shuffling savates,
relating or drinking in the wonderful and
the intimate. One of his masterpieces rep
resents three of these dames, lighted by a

guttering candle, holding their heads to
gether to discuss the fearful earthquake at
Bordeaux, the consequence of the govern
ment's allowing the surface of the globe to
be unduly dug out in California. The rep
resentation of confidential imbecility could
not go further. When a man leaves out so
much of life as Daumier — youth and beauty
and the charm of woman and the loveliness
of childhood and the manners of those so
cial groups of whom it may most be said
that they have manners — when he exhibits
a deficiency on this scale it might seem that
the question was not to be so easily dis
posed of as in the very non-apologetic words
I have just quoted. All the same (and I con
fess it is singular), we may feel what Dau
mier omitted and yet not be in the least
shocked by the claim of predominance made
for him. It is impossible to spend a couple
of hours over him without assenting to this
claim, even though there may be a weariness
in such a panorama of ugliness and an inevi
table reaction from it. This anomaly, and
the challenge to explain it which appears to
proceed from him, render him, to my sense,
remarkably interesting. The artist whose

'38

idiosyncrasies, whose limitations, if you will,
make us question and wonder, in the light
of his fame, has an element of fascination
not attaching to conciliatory talents. If M.
Eugene Montrosier may say of him without
scandalizing us that such and such of his
drawings belong to the very highest art, it
is interesting (and Daumier profits by the
interest) to put one's finger on the reason
we are not scandalized.

I think this reason is that, on the whole,
he is so peculiarly serious. This may seem an
odd ground of praise for a jocose draughts
man, and of course what I mean is that his
comic force is serious — a very different thing
from the absence of comedy. This essential
sign of the caricaturist may surely be any
thing it will so long as it is there. Daumier's
figures are almost always either foolish, fatu
ous politicians or frightened, mystified bour
geois ; yet they help him to give us a strong
sense of the nature of man. They are some
times so serious that they are almost tragic;
the look of the particular pretension, com
bined with inanity, is carried almost to
madness. There is a magnificent drawing
of the series of " Le Public du Salon," old

'39

classicists looking up, horrified and scandal
ized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in
which the faces have an appalling gloom of
mystification and platitude. We feel that
Daumier reproduces admirably the particu
lar life that he sees, because it is the very
medium in which he moves. He has no
wide horizon ; the absolute bourgeois hems
him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, with
out poetic ironies, to whom a big cracked
mirror has been given. His thick, strong,
manly touch stands, in every way, for so
much knowledge. He used to make little
images, in clay and in wax (many of them
still exist), of the persons he was in the habit
of representing, so that they might constant
ly seem to be " sitting " for him. The cari
caturist of that day had not the help of the
ubiquitous photograph. Daumier painted
actively, as well, in his habitation, all dedi
cated to work, on the narrow island of St.
Louis, where the Seine divides and where
the monuments of old Paris stand thick,
and the types that were to his purpose
pressed close upon him. He had not far
to go to encounter the worthy man, in the
series of " Les Papas," who is reading the

140

evening paper at the cafe with so amiable
and placid a credulity, while his unnatural
little boy, opposite to him, finds sufficient
entertainment in the much -satirized Con-
stitutionnel. The bland absorption of the
papa, the face of the man who believes
everything he sees in the newspaper, is as
near as Daumier often comes to positive
gentleness of humor. Of the same family
is the poor gentleman, in " Actualites," seen,
in profile, under a doorway where he has
taken refuge from a torrent of rain, who
looks down at his neat legs with a sort of
speculative contrition and says, " To think
of my having just ordered two pairs of
white trousers." The tout petit bourgeois
palpitates in both these sketches.

I must repeat that it is absurd to pick
half a dozen at hazard, out of five thousand ;
yet a few selections are the only way to call
attention to his strong drawing. This has
a virtuosity of its own, for all its hit-or-miss
appearance. Whatever he touches — the
nude, in the swimming-baths on the Seine,
the intimations of landscape, when his pe-
tits rentiers go into the suburbs for a Sun
day — acquires relief and character. Doc-

teur Veron, a celebrity of the reign of Louis-
Philippe, a Maecenas of the hour, a director
of the opera, author of the Mtmoires d'un
Bourgeois de Paris — this temporary " illus
tration," who appears to have been almost
indecently ugly, would not be vivid to us
to-day had not Daumier, who was often
effective at his expense, happened to have
represented him, in some crisis of his career,
as a sort of naked inconsolable Vitellius.
He renders the human body with a cynical
sense of its possible flabbiness and an inti
mate acquaintance with its structure. " Une
Promenade Conjugate," in the series of
"Tout ce qu'on voudra," portrays a hill
side, on a summer afternoon, on which a
man has thrown himself on his back to
rest, with his arms locked under his head.
His fat, full -bosomed, middle-aged wife,
under her parasol, with a bunch of field-
flowers in her hand, looks down at him
patiently and seems to say, " Come, my dear,
get up." There is surely no great point in
this; the only point is life, the glimpse of
the little snatch of poetry in prose. It is a
matter of a few broad strokes of the crayon ;
yet the pleasant laziness of the man, the

idleness of the day, the fragment of homely,
familiar dialogue, the stretch of the field
with a couple of trees merely suggested,
have a communicative truth.

I perhaps exaggerate all this, and in insist
ing upon the merit of Daumier may appear
to make light of the finer accomplishment
of several more modern talents, in England
and France, who have greater ingenuity
and subtlety and have carried qualities of
execution so much further. In looking
at this complicated younger work, which
has profited so by experience and compari
son, it is inevitable that we should perceive
it to be infinitely more cunning. On the
other hand Daumier, moving in his con
tracted circle, has an impressive depth. It
comes back to his strange seriousness. He
is a draughtsman by race, and if he has not
extracted the same brilliancy from training,
or perhaps even from effort and experi
ment, as some of his successors, does not
his richer satiric and sympathetic feeling
more than make up the difference ?

However this question may be answered,
some of his drawings belong to the class of
the unforgetable. It may be a perversity

of prejudice, but even the little cut of the
"Connoisseurs," the group of gentlemen
collected round a picture and criticising it
in various attitudes of sapience and suffi
ciency, appears to me to have the strength
that abides. The criminal in the dock, the
flat-headed murderer, bending over to speak
to his advocate, who turns a whiskered, pro
fessional, anxious head to caution and re
mind him, tells a large, terrible story and
awakes a recurrent shudder. We see the
gray court-room, we feel the personal sus
pense and the immensity of justice. The
"Saltimbanques," reproduced in L'Art for
1878, is a page of tragedy, the finest of a
cruel series. M. Eugene Montrosier says
of it that " The drawing is masterly, incom
parably firm, the composition superb, the
general impression quite of the first order."
It exhibits a pair of lean, hungry mounte
banks, a clown and a harlequin beating the
drum and trying a comic attitude to attract
the crowd, at a fair, to a poor booth in front
of which a painted canvas, offering to view
a simpering fat woman, is suspended. But
the crowd doesn't come, and the battered
tumblers, with their furrowed cheeks, go

through their pranks in the void. The
whole thing is symbolic and full of grim-
ness, imagination and pity. It is the sense
that we shall find in him, mixed with his
homelier extravagances, an element prolific
in indications of this order that draws us
back to Daumier.

1890.

AFTER THE PLAY

I H E play was not over when the
curtain fell, four months ago;
it was continued in a supple
mentary act or epilogue which
took place immediately after
wards. " Come home to tea," Florentia
said to certain friends who had stopped to
speak to her in the lobby of the little thea
tre in Soho — they had been present at a
day performance by the company of the
Theatre Libre, transferred for a week from
Paris; and three of these — Auberon and
Dorriforth, accompanying Amicia — turned
up so expeditiously that the change of
scene had the effect of being neatly execut
ed. The short afterpiece — it was in truth
very slight — began with Amicia's entrance
and her declaration that she would never
again go to an afternoon performance: it
was such a horrid relapse into the real to

find it staring at you through the ugly day
light on coming out of the blessed fictive
world.

DORRIFORTH. Ah, you touch there on
one of the minor sorrows of life. That's an
illustration of the general change that comes
to pass in us as we grow older, if we have
ever loved the stage : the fading of the
glamour and the mystery that surround it.

AUBERON. Do you call it a minor sor
row ? It's one of the greatest. And noth
ing can mitigate it.

AMICIA. Wouldn't it be mitigated a little
if the stage were a trifle better? You must
remember how that has changed.

AUBERON. Never, never: it's the same
old stage. The change is in ourselves.

FLORENTIA. Well, I never would have
given an evening to what we have just
seen. If one could have put it in between
luncheon and tea, well enough. But one's
evenings are too precious.

DORRIFORTH. Note that — it's very im
portant.

FLORENTIA. I mean too precious for that
sort of thing.

AUBERON. Then you didn't sit spell-

bound by the little history of the Due
d'Enghien?

FLORENTIA. I sat yawning. Heavens,
what a piece !

AMICIA. Upon my word I liked it. The
last act made me cry.

DORRIFORTH. Wasn't it a curious, inter
esting specimen of some of the things that
are worth trying : an attempt to sail closer
to the real ?

AUBERON. How much closer? The fif
tieth part of a point — it isn't calculable.

FLORENTIA. It was just like any other
play — I saw no difference. It had neither
a plot, nor a subject, nor dialogue, nor sit
uations, nor scenery, nor costumes, nor act
ing.

AMICIA. Then it was hardly, as you say.
just like any other play.

AUBERON. Florentia should have said like
any other bad one.. The only way it differed
seemed to be that it was bad in theory as
well as in fact.

AMICIA. It's a morceau de vie, as the
French say.

AUBERON. Oh, don't begin on the
French !

AMICIA. It's a French experiment — que
voulez-vous ?

AUBERON. English experiments will do.

DORRI FORTH. No doubt they would — if
there were any. But I don't see them.

AMICIA. Fortunately : think what some
of them might be ! Though Florentia saw
nothing I saw many things in this poor lit
tle shabby " Due d'Enghien," coming over
to our roaring London, where the dots have
to be so big on the i's, with its barely
audible note of originality. It appealed
to me, touched me, offered me a poignant
suggestion of the way things happen in
life.

AUBERON. In life they happen clumsily,
stupidly, meanly. One goes to the theatre
just for the refreshment of seeing them
happen in another way — in symmetrical,
satisfactory form, with unmistakable effect
and just at the right moment.

DORRIFORTH. It shows how the same
cause may produce the most diverse conse
quences. In this truth lies the only hope
of art.

AUBERON. Oh, art, art — don't talk about
art!

'49

AMICIA. Mercy, we must talk about
something!

DORRI FORTH. Auberon hates generaliza
tions. Nevertheless I make bold to say
that we go to the theatre in the same spirit
in which we read a novel, some of us to find
one thing and some to find another; and ac
cording as we look for the particular thing
we find it.

AUBERON. That's a profound remark.

FLORENTIA. We go to find amusement :
that, surely, is what we all go for.

AMICIA. There's such a diversity in our
idea of amusement.

AUBERON. Don't you impute to people
more ideas than they have ?

DORRIFORTH. Ah, one must do that or
one couldn't talk about them. We go to
be interested ; to be absorbed, beguiled and
to lose ourselves, to give ourselves up, in
short, to a charm.

FLORENTIA. And the charm is the
strange, the extraordinary.

AMICIA. Ah, speak for yourself! The
charm is the recognition of what we know,
what we feel.

DORRIFORTH. See already how you differ.

What we surrender ourselves to is the touch
of nature, the sense of life.

AMICIA. The first thing is to believe.

FLORENTIA. The first thing, on the con
trary, is to dfobelieve.

AUBERON. Lord, listen to them !

DORRIFORTH. The first thing is to follow
— to care.

FLORENTIA. I read a novel, I go to the
theatre, to forget.

AMICIA. To forget what ?

FLORENTIA. To forget life ; to throw
myself into something more beautiful,
more exciting : into fable and romance.

DORRIFORTH. The attraction of fable
and romance is that it's about us, about
you and me — or people whose power to
suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In
other words, we live their experience, for
the time, and that's hardly escaping from
life.

FLORENTIA. I'm not at all particular as
to what you call it. Call it an escape from
the common, the prosaic, the immediate.

DORRIFORTH. You couldn't put it better.
That's the life that art, with Auberon's per
mission, gives us ; that's the distinction it

confers. This is why the greatest common
ness is when our guide turns out a vulgar
fellow — the angel, as we had supposed him,
who has taken us by the hand. Then what
becomes of our escape ?

FLORENTIA. It's precisely then that I
complain of him. He leads us into foul
and dreary places — into flat and foolish
deserts.

DORRI FORTH. He leads us into his own
mind, his own vision of things : that's the
only place into which the poet can lead us.
It's there that he finds "As You Like It," it is
there that he finds " Comus," or" The Way of
the World," or the Christmas pantomime.
It is when he betrays us, after he has got
us in and locked the door, when he can't
keep from us that we are in a bare little
hole and that there are no pictures on the
walls, it is then that the immediate and
the foolish overwhelm us.

AMICIA. That's what I liked in the piece
we have been looking at. There was an
artistic intention, and the little room wasn't
bare : there was sociable company in it.
The actors were very humble aspirants,
they were common —

AUBERON. Ah, when the French give
their mind to that — !

AMICIA. Nevertheless they struck me as
recruits to an interesting cause, which as
yet (the house was so empty) could confer
neither money nor glory. They had the
air, poor things, of working for love.

AUBERON. For love of what ?

AMICIA. Of the whole little enterprise—
the idea of the Theatre Libre.

FLORENTIA. Gracious, what you see in
things ! Don't you suppose they were paid ?

AMICIA. I know nothing about it. I
liked their shabbiness — they had only what
was indispensable in the way of dress and
scenery. That often pleases me : the im
agination, in certain cases, is more finely
persuaded by the little than by the much.

DORRIFORTH. I see what Amicia means.

FLORENTIA. I'll warrant you do, and a
great deal more besides.

DORRIFORTH. When the appointments
are meagre and sketchy the responsibility
that rests upon the actors becomes a still
more serious thing, and the spectator's ob
servation of the way they rise to it a pleas
ure more intense. The face and the voice

'53

are more to the purpose than acres of
painted canvas, and a touching intonation,
a vivid gesture or two, than an army of
supernumeraries.

AUBERON. Why not have everything —
the face, the voice, the touching intona
tions, the vivid gestures, the acres of paint
ed can vas,and the army of supernumeraries?
Why not use bravely and intelligently every
resource of which the stage disposes? What
else was Richard Wagner's great theory, in
producing his operas at Bayreuth ?

DORRI FORTH. Why not, indeed ? That
would be the ideal. To have the picture
complete at the same time the figures do
their part in producing the particular il
lusion required — what a perfection and
what a joy ! I know no answer to that
save the aggressive, objectionable fact.
Simply look at the stage of to-day and ob
serve that these two branches of the matter
never do happen to go together. There is
evidently a corrosive principle in the large
command of machinery and decorations — a
germ of perversion and corruption. It gets
the upperhand — it becomes the master. It
is so much less easy to get good actors than

'54

good scenery and to represent a situation
by the delicacy of personal art than by
" building it in " and having everything
real. Surely there is no reality worth a
farthing, on the stage, but what the actor
gives, and only when he has learned his
business up to the hilt need he concern
himself with his material accessories. He
hasn't a decent respect for his art unless he
be ready to render his part as if the whole
illusion depended on that alone and the
accessories didn't exist. The acting is
everything or it's nothing. It ceases to be
everything as soon as something else be
comes very important. This is the case,
to-day, on the London stage : something
else is very important. The public have
been taught to consider it so : the clever
machinery has ended by operating as a
bribe and a blind. Their sense of the rest
of the matter has gone to the dogs, as you
may perceive when you hear a couple of
occupants of the stalls talking, in a tone
that excites your curiosity, about a per
formance that's " splendid."

AMICIA. Do you ever hear the occu
pants of the stalls talking ? Never, in the

'55

entr'actes, have I detected, on their lips, a
criticism or a comment.

DORRIFORTH. Oh, they say " splendid "
— distinctly ! But a question or two re
veals that their reference is vague : they
don't themselves know whether they mean
the art of the actor or that of the stage-
carpenter.

AUBERON. Isn't that confusion a high
result of taste ? Isn't it what's called a
feeling for the ensemble? The artistic ef
fect, as a whole, is so welded together that
you can't pick out the parts.

DORRIFORTH. Precisely ; that's what it is
in the best cases, and some examples are
wonderfully clever.

FLORENTIA. Then what fault do you
find?

DORRIFORTH. Simply this — that the
whole is a pictorial whole, not a dramatic
one. There is something indeed that you
can't pick out, for the very good reason that
— in any serious sense of the word — it isn't
there.

FLORENTIA. The public has taste, then,
if it recognizes and delights in a fine pict
ure.

,S6

DORRIFORTH. I never said it hadn't, so
far as that goes. The public likes to be
amused, and small blame to it. It isn't
very particular about the means, but it has
rather a preference for amusements that it
believes to be " improving," other things
being equal. I don't think it's either very
intelligent or at all opinionated, the dear
old public • it takes humbly enough what
is given it and it doesn't cry for the moon.
It has an idea that fine scenery is an ap
peal to its nobler part, and that it shows
a nice critical sense in preferring it to
poor. That's a real intellectual flight, for
the public.

AUBERON. Very well, its preference is
right, and why isn't that a perfectly legiti
mate state of things ?

DORRIFORTH. Why isn't it? It distinct
ly is! Good scenery and poor acting are
better than poor scenery with the same
sauce. Only it becomes then another mat
ter : we are no longer talking about the
drama.

AUBERON. Very likely that's the future
of the drama, in London — an immense
elaboration of the picture.

157

DORRI FORTH. My dear fellow, you take
the words out of my mouth. An immense
elaboration of the picture and an immense
sacrifice of everything else : it would take
very little more to persuade me that that
will be the only formula for our children.
It's all right, when once we have buried our
dead. I have no doubt that the scenic part
of the art, remarkable as some of its achieve
ments already appear to us, is only in its in
fancy, and that we are destined to see won
ders done that we now but faintly conceive.
The probable extension of the mechanical
arts is infinite. " Built in," forsooth ! We
shall see castles and cities and mountains
and rivers built in. Everything points that
way ; especially the constitution of the con
temporary multitude. It is huge and good-
natured and common. It likes big, unmis
takable, knock-down effects ; it likes to get
its money back in palpable, computable
change. It's in a tremendous hurry,
squeezed together, with a sort of general
ized gape, and the last thing it expects of
you is that you will spin things fine. You
can't portray a character, alas, or even,
vividly, any sort of human figure, unless, in

sortie degree, you do that. Therefore the
theatre, inevitably accommodating itself,
will be at last a landscape without figures.
I mean, of course, without figures that
count. There will be little illustrations of
costume stuck about — dressed manikins;
but they'll have nothing to say : they won't
even go through the form of speech.

AMICIA. What a hideous prospect !

DORRI FORTH. Not necessarily, for we
shall have grown used to it : we shall, as I
say, have buried our dead. To-day it's
cruel, because our old ideals are only dying,
they are in extremis, they are virtually de
funct, but they are above-ground — we trip
and stumble on them. We shall eventually
lay them tidily away. This is a bad mo
ment, because it's a moment of transition,
and we still miss the old superstition, the
bravery of execution, the eloquence of the
lips, the interpretation of character. We
miss these things, of course, in proportion
as the ostensible occasion for them is great ;
we miss them particularly, for instance,
when the curtain rises on Shakespeare.
Then we are conscious of a certain divine
dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which

isn't. But we shall have got over this dis
comfort on the day when we have accepted
the ostensible occasion as merely and frank
ly ostensible, and the real one as having
nothing to do with it.

FLORENTIA. I don't follow you. As I'm
one of the squeezed, gaping public, I must
be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way,
immense injustice to that body. They do
care for character — care much for it. Aren't
they perpetually talking about the actor's
conception of it ?

DORRI FORTH. Dear lady, what better
proof can there be of their ineptitude, and
that painted canvas and real water are the
only things they understand ? The vanity
of wasting time over that !

AUBERON. Over what ?

DORRI FORTH. The actor's conception of
a part. It's the refuge of observers who
are no observers and critics who are no
critics. With what on earth have we to do
save his execution ?

FLORENTIA. I don't in the least agree
with you.

AMICIA. Are you very sure, my poor Dor-
ri forth ?

AUBERON. Give him rope and he'll hang
himself.

DORRIFORTH. It doesn't need any great
license to ask who in the world holds in his
bosom the sacred secret of the right con
ception. All the actor can do is to give us
his. We must take that one for granted,
we make him a present of it. He mustnm-
pose his conception upon us —

AUBERON (interrupting). I thought you
said we accepted it.

DORRIFORTH. Impose it upon our atten
tion, clever Auberon. It is because we ac
cept his idea that he must repay us by mak
ing it vivid, by showing us how valuable it
is. We give him a watch : he must show
us what time it keeps. He winds it up,
that is he executes the conception, and his
execution is what we criticise, if we be so
moved. Can anything be more absurd than
to hear people discussing the conception of
a part of which the execution doesn't exist
— the idea of a character which never ar
rives at form ? Think what it is, that form,
as an accomplished actor may give it to us,
and admit that we have enough to do to
hold him to this particular honor.

AUBEROX. Do you mean to say you don't
think some conceptions are better than
some others ?

DORRI FORTH. Most assuredly, some are
better : the proof of the pudding is in the
eating. The best are those which yield the
most points, which have the largest face ;
those, in other words, that are the most
demonstrable, or, in other words still, the
most actable. The most intelligent per
former is he who recognizes most surely
this " actable " and distinguishes in it the
more from the less. But we are so far from
being in possession of a subjective pattern
to which we have a right to hold him that
he is entitled directly to contradict any such
absolute by presenting us with different ver
sions of the same text, each completely col
ored, completely consistent with itself. Ev
ery actor in whom the artistic life is strong
must often feel the challenge to do that. I
should never think, for instance, of contest
ing an actress's right to represent Lady
Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman,
if she really sees the figure that way. I
may be surprised at such a vision ; but so
far from being scandalized, I am positively

thankful for the extension of knowledge,
of pleasure, that she is able to open to me.

AUBERON. A reading, as they say, either
commends itself to one's sense of truth or
it doesn't. In the one case —

DORRIFORTH. In the one case I recognize,
even — or especially — when the presumption
may have been against the particular at
tempt, a consummate illustration of what
art can do. In the other I moralize indul
gently upon human rashness.

FLORENTIA. You have an assurance a
toute tpreuve ; but you are deplorably super
ficial. There is a whole group of plays and
a whole category of acting to which your
generalizations quite fail to apply. Help
me, Auberon.

AUBERON. You're easily exhausted. I
suppose she means that it's far from true
everywhere that the scenery is everything.
It may be true — I don't say it is! — of two
or three good-natured playhouses in Lon
don. It isn't true — how can it be ? — of the
provincial theatres or of the others in the
capital. Put it even that they would be all
scenery if they could ; they can't, poor things
— so they have to provide acting.

•63

DORRI FORTH. They have to, fortunately;
but what do we hear of it ?

FLORENTIA. How do you mean, what do
we hear of it ?

DORRI FORTH. In what trumpet of fame
does it reach us ? They do what they can,
the performers Auberon alludes to, and
they are brave souls. But I am speaking
of the conspicuous cases, of the exhibitions
that draw.

FLORENTIA. There is good acting that
draws ; one could give you names and
places.

DORRI FORTH. I have already guessed
those you mean. But when it isn't too
much a matter of the paraphernalia it is
too little a matter of the play. A play now
adays is a rare bird. I should like to see
one.

FLORENTIA. There are lots of them, all
the while — the newspapers talk about them.
People talk about them at dinners.

DORRI FORTH. What do they say about
them ?

FLORENTIA. The newspapers ?

DORRI FORTH. No, I don't care for them.
The people at dinners.

FLORENTIA. Oh, they don't say anything
in particular.

DORRIFORTH. Doesn't that seem to show
the effort isn't very suggestive?

AMICIA. The conversation at dinners cer
tainly isn't.

DORRIFORTH. I mean our contemporary
drama. To begin with, you can't find it —
there's no text.

FLORENTIA. No text ?

AUBERON. So much the better!

DORRIFORTH. So much the better if there
is to be no criticism. There is only a dirty
prompter's book. One can't put one's hand
upon it ; one doesn't know what one is dis
cussing. There is no " authority " — nothing
is ever published.

AMICIA. The pieces wouldn't bear that.

DORRIFORTH. It would be a small ordeal
to resist — if there were anything in them.
Look at the novels !

AMICIA. The text is the French brochure.
The "adaptation " is unprintable.

DORRIFORTH. That's where it's so wrong,
It ought at least to be as good as the
original.

AUBERON. Aren't there some " rights " to

•65

protect — some risk of the play being stolen
if it's published ?

DORRI FORTH. There may be — I don't
know. Doesn't that only prove how little
important we regard the drama as being,
and how little seriously we take it, if we
won't even trouble ourselves to bring about
decent civil conditions for its existence ?
What have we to do with the French bro
chure? how does that help us to represent
our own life, our manners, our customs, our
ideas, our English types, our English world ?
Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for
portraiture, for satire, as they all make-
such subjects as they would yield ! Think
of London alone — what a matchless hunt
ing-ground for the satirist — the most mag
nificent that ever was. If the occasion al
ways produced the man London would have
produced an Aristophanes. But somehow
it doesn't.

FLORENTIA. Oh, types and ideas, Aris
tophanes and satire — !

DORRI FORTH. I'm too ambitious, you
mean ? I shall presently show you that I'm
not ambitious at all. Everything makes
against that — I am only reading the signs.

AUBERON. The plays are arranged to be
as English as possible : they are altered,
they are fitted.

DORRI FORTH. Fitted? Indeed they are,
and to the capacity of infants. They are in
too many cases made vulgar, puerile, bar
barous. They are neither fish nor flesh, and
with all the point that's left out and all the
naivete that's put in, they cease to place be
fore us any coherent appeal or any recog
nizable society.

AUBERON. They often make good plays
to act, all the same.

DORRI FORTH. They may ; but they don't
make good plays to see or to hear. The
theatre consists of two things, que diable —
of the stage and the drama, and I don't see
how you can have it unless you have both,
or how you can have either unless you have
the other. They are the two blades of a
pair of scissors.

AUBERON. You are very unfair to native
talent. There are lots of strictly original
plays —

AMICIA. Yes, they put that expression on
the posters.

AUBERON. I don't know what they put

t67

on the posters; but the plays are written
and acted — produced with great success.

DORRI FORTH. Produced — partly. A play
isn't fully produced until it is in a form in
which you can refer to it. We have to talk
in the air. I can refer to my Congreve, but
I can't to my Pinero. *

FLORENTIA. The authors are not bound
to publish them if they don't wish.

DORRIFORTH. Certainly not, nor are they
in that case bound to insist on one's not
being a little vague about them. They are
perfectly free to withhold them ; they may
have very good reasons for it, and I can
imagine some that would be excellent and
worthy of all respect. But their withhold
ing them is one of the signs.

AUBERON. What signs?

DORRIFORTH. Those I just spoke of —
those we are trying to read together. The
signs that ambition and desire are folly, that
the sun of the drama has set, that the mat
ter isn't worth talking about, that it has
ceased to be an interest for serious folk,
and that everything — everything, I mean,

* Since the above was written several of Mr. Pinero's
plays have been published.

1 68

that's anything — is over. The sooner we
recognize it the sooner to sleep, the sooner
we get clear of misleading illusions and are
purged of the bad blood that disappoint
ment makes. It's a pity, because the thea
tre — after every allowance is made — might
have been a fine thing. At all events it was
a pleasant — it was really almost a noble —
d ream . Requiescat !

FLORENTIA. I see nothing to confirm
your absurd theory. I delight in the play ;
more people than ever delight in it with
me ; more people than ever go to it, and
there are ten theatres in London where
there were two of old.

DORRIFORTH. Which is what was to be
demonstrated. Whence do they derive their
nutriment ?

AUBERON. Why, from the enormous pub
lic.

DORRIFORTH. My dear fellow, I'm not
talking of the box-office. What wealth of
dramatic, of histrionic production have we,
to meet that enormous demand ? There
will be twenty theatres ten years hence
where there are ten to-day, and there will
be, no doubt, ten times as many people " de-

lighting in them," like Florentia. But it
won't alter the fact that our dream will have
been dreamed. Florentia said a word when
we came in which alone speaks volumes.

FLORENTIA. What was my word ?

AUBERON. You are sovereignly unjust to
native talent among the actors — I leave the
dramatists alone. There are many who do
excellent, independent work ; strive for per
fection, completeness — in short, the things
we want.

DORRI FORTH. I am not in the least un
just to them — I only pity them : they have
so little to put sous la dent. It must seem
to them at times that no one will work for
them, that they are likely to starve for parts
— forsaken of gods and men.

FLORENTIA. If they work, then, in soli
tude and sadness, they have the more hon
or, and one should recognize more explicit
ly their great merit.

DORRIFORTH. Admirably said. Their
laudable effort is prec:sely the one little
loop-hole that I see of escape from the gen
eral doom. Certainly we must try to en
large it — that small aperture into the blue.
We must fix our eyes on it and make much

of it, exaggerate it, do anything with it that
may contribute to restore a working faith.
Precious that must be to the sincere spirits
on the stage who are conscious of all the
other things — formidable things — that rise
against them.

AMICIA. What other things do you mean?

DORRIFORTH. Why, for one thing, the
grossness and brutality of London, with its
scramble, its pressure, its hustle of engage
ments, of preoccupations, its long distances,
its late hours, its nightly dinners, its innu
merable demands on the attention, its gen
eral congregation of influences fatal to the
isolation, to the punctuality, to the securi
ty, of the dear old playhouse spell. When
Florentia said in her charming way —

FLORENTIA. Here's my dreadful speech
at last.

DORRIFORTH. When you said that you
went to the Theatre Libre in the afternoon
because you couldn't spare an evening, I
recognized the death-knell of the drama.
Time, the very breath of its nostrils, AS lack
ing. Wagner was clever to go to leisurely
Bayreuth among the hills — the Bayreuth of
spacious days, a paradise of " development."

Talk to a London audience of " develop
ment !" The long runs would, if necessary,
put the whole question into a nutshell.
Figure to yourself, for then the question is
answered, how an intelligent actor must
loathe them, and what a cruel negation he
must find in them of the artistic life, the life
of which the very essence is variety of prac
tice, freshness of experiment, and to feel
that one must do many things in turn to do
any one of them completely.

AUBERON. I don't in the least understand
your acharnement, in view of the vagueness
of your contention.

DORRI FORTH. My achamement is your
little joke, and my contention is a little les
son in philosophy.

FLORENTIA. I prefer a lesson in taste. I
had one the other night at the " Merry
Wives."

DORRI FORTH. If you come to that, so
did I!

AMICIA. So she does spare an evening
sometimes.

FLORENTIA. It was all extremely quiet
and comfortable, and I don't in the least
recognize Dorriforth's lurid picture of the

dreadful conditions. There was no scenery
— at least not too much ; there was just
enough, and it was very pretty, and it was
in its place.

DORRIFORTH. And what else was there?

FLORENTIA. There was very good act
ing.

AMICIA. I also went, and I thought it all,
for a sportive, wanton thing, quite painfully
ugly.

AUBERON. Uglier than that ridiculous
black room, with the invisible people grop
ing about in it, of your precious " Due d'En-
ghien ?"

DORRIFORTH. The black room is doubt
less not the last word of art, but it struck
me as a successful application of a happy
idea. The contrivance was perfectly sim
ple — a closer night effect than is usually at
tempted, with a few guttering candles, which
threw high shadows over the bare walls, on
the table of the court-martial. Out of the
gloom came the voices and tones of the dis
tinguishable figures, and it is perhaps a fan
cy of mine that it made them — given the
situation, of course — more impressive and
dramatic.

AUBERON. You rail against scenery, but
what could belong more to the order of
things extraneous to what you perhaps a
little priggishly call the delicacy of personal
art than the arrangement you are speak
ing of?

DORRIFORTH. I was talking of the abuse
of scenery. I never said anything so idiotic
as that the effect isn't helped by an appeal
to the eye and an adumbration of the
whereabouts.

AUBERON. But where do you draw the
line and fix the limit? What is the exact
dose ?

DORRIFORTH. It's a question of taste and
tact.

FLORENTIA. And did you find taste and
tact in that coal-hole of the Theatre Libre?

DORRIFORTH. Coal-hole is again your
joke. I found a strong impression in it —
an impression of the hurried, extemporized
cross-examination, by night, of an impatient
and mystified prisoner, whose dreadful fate
had been determined in advance, who was
to be shot, high-handedly, in the dismal
dawn. The arrangement didn't worry and
distract me : it was simplifying, intensify-

ing. It gave, what a judicious mise-en-
schie should always do, the essence of the
matter, and left the embroidery to the
actors.

FLORENTIA. At the " Merry Wives,"
where you could see your hand before your
face, I could make out the embroidery.

DORRIFORTH. Could you, under Falstaff's
pasteboard cheeks and the sad disfigure
ment of his mates? There was no excess
of scenery, Auberon says. Why, Falstaff's
very person was nothing bttt scenery. A
false face, a false figure, false hands, false
legs — scarcely a square inch on which the
irrepressible humor of the rogue could
break into illustrative touches. And he is
so human, so expressive, of so rich a physi
ognomy. One would rather Mr. Beerbohm
Tree should have played the part in his
own clever, elegant slim ness — that would
at least have represented life. A Falstaff
all " make - up " is an opaque substance.
This seems to me an example of what the
rest still more suggested, that in deal
ing with a production like the " Merry
Wives " really the main quality to put for
ward is discretion. You must resolve such

'75

a production, as a thing represented, into a
tone that the imagination can take an
aesthetic pleasure in. Its grossness must be
transposed, as it were, to a fictive scale, a
scale of fainter tints and generalized signs.
A filthy, eruptive, realistic Bardolph and
Pistol overlay the romantic with the literal.
Relegate them and blur them, to the eye ;
let their blotches be constructive and their
raggedness relative.

AMICIA. Ah, it was so ugly !

DORRI FORTH. What a pity then, after all,
there wasn't more painted canvas to divert
you ! Ah, decidedly, the theatre of the fut
ure must be that.

FLORENTIA. Please remember your the
ory that our life's a scramble, and suffer me
to go and dress for dinner.

1889.

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